Discipled by pain

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How to keep the next generation in church.

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The latest research indicates that 70% of the kids who grow up in our youth groups are not staying in church. Project that out for about ten years and we have disaster. Based on data from Essential Church, the trend looks like this: For a free sample of the book, see http://www.lifeway.com/lwc/files/lwcF_PDF_Rainers_Essential_Church_Sample.pdf Another good book on the subject is Ed Stetzer's Lost and Found. Let's look at it more personally. My oldest son graduated from High School in 2004. He walked across the stage at church at the recognition ceremony along with 20 or so of his classmates. Most of them had been very active in youth group. Very few of them are active in church today. In fact, my son may be the only one. If you are in the mood for a good depression, do the math at your church. Dig up the list of the kids that graduated five years ago. See if you can figure out how many of them are in church ...
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Sunday School revival

It is amazing what happens when you listen to people. Everyone should be slow to speak and quick to listen. Somebody smart wrote that! For the last several months I have been listening to the people who attend my conferences. I have been using a very simple evaluation form -- one with two questions: What did you like? What could I improve? People always said kind things. I think that has more to do with them being kind than anything I did. I was not surprised at all by two of the suggestions. I was shocked by the third. I didn't actually track it, but it was probably the most common suggestion for change. First, here are the two I was not surprised by. Slow down. I work on that, but unsuccessfully. You just get me talking about doubling groups and I get all fired up. Provide a fill-in-the-blanks note-taking piece. I actually used to do this. Occasionally hosts would drop the ball and not make copies. I always did better when that was the case. I just speak better w...
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The Gospel that doubles, part 1

I work full time promoting church growth in a world where church growth is a multi-million dollar industry and the church is not growing. Millions are spend every year on books, CDs, conferences, DVDs, web pages, research and consulting and the church is not growing. I don't want to be too hard on those of us in the church growth industry/ministry. (I often feel I wear two hats: business man and minister.) The church might be doing even worse without us. But, I can't help but contrast this world with the world of the early church where, best I can tell, there was no church growth industry. They didn't have any church growth seminars or church growth books or church growth consultants, and the church was growing and growing rapidly. Not just one church. Not just a few churches. Overall, there was a movement of church growth that was rapidly advancing. (As it is in much of the world, outside of the USA, today.) Not only did t...
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