Why do some congregations grow more quickly than others? In this episode we speak with Matt Miofsky, founding and lead pastor of The Gathering in St. Louis, about the book he wrote with Jason Byassee, 8 Virtues of Rapidly Growing Churches.

Transcript

Why do some congregations grow more quickly than others? In this episode we speak with Rev. Matt Miofisky, the founding and lead pastor of The Gathering in St. Louis, about his co-authored book 8 Virtues of Rapidly Growing Churches.

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Doug Powe: Welcome to Leading Ideas Talks, a podcast featuring thought leaders and innovative practitioners. I’m Douglas Powe, the director of the Lewis Center and your host for this talk. Joining me is Reverend Matt Miofsky, the founding and lead pastor of the Gathering in St. Louis, MO. Our focus for this podcast is the virtues of rapidly growing churches.

Matt, you have co-authored a book with Jason Byasse “8 Virtues of Rapidly Growing Churches” that I believe can help any congregation to look at its core practices and a book that I believe every congregation really should pick up and put to use. But I really want to begin our conversation by asking you, why did you all use the term “virtue” to describe the characteristics of rapidly growing churches?

Matt Miofsky: Hey yeah, that’s a good question. Thanks for having me on Doug.  It’s good to be with you. And you know, I’ll have to be honest, part of that word was kind of a feeling that characteristic or attribute –you know, both of those were both alternatives — eight attributes, eight characteristics. First of all, those words didn’t seem to mean much. Maybe they’re a bit overused. They also didn’t necessarily note something that was good, just the commonalities that things have. And we really wanted, we love the word virtue because it has a little bit of a root in the Christian tradition. But it also denotes not only eight similarities, but these are eight things that we think every church would do well to strive for. They don’t just happen to be common characteristics but they’re actually aspirational. Every church, we think, ought to be going for these kinds of things anyways. So, we thought the nuance of the word virtue got at that better than just simply being eight commonalities or eight characteristics.

Doug Powe: I really like the word aspirational that you’re using because I think that it points to something that is important for congregations and I appreciate the way you frame that because I think, too often, congregations think in terms of goals or, I can do this, and figure out how to accomplish this, then I’m done. But when you think aspirational, it means it’s something that’s ongoing. Is that sort of the hope that you all were having, that this would be a thing?

Matt Miofsky: Yeah. You know, that really was the hope. I didn’t want to simply come up with a recipe for churches but I loved about these is, even in doing the research for these, and I can talk a little bit about where the book came from, you know. Jason Byasse, the co-author, he came to me. It started out because he was interested in five Methodist Churches that had grown over 1,000 in worship but were started in the past ten years. He said there were five at the time. This was several years ago. And he listed off the five and the Gathering in St. Louis, the Church I pastor, was one of them. And he said “I want to write this profile on these five churches, I think that’d be really interesting.” I kind of said to him “you know, hey Jason, respectfully, I don’t think