You have a lot going on at your church. In an average week, a typical pastor spends time on message prep, counseling, training, attending leadership meetings, and dealing with the administrative hassles that occur when running the “small business” aspects of a church. Just being on the treadmill of keeping the church running every week consumes a vast majority of a pastor’s time.

Being a part of a church is an all-consuming endeavor that requires more effort and energy than we would have ever believed when we were in seminary.

Considering those circumstances, do you ever have time during your day to think about church growth?

In some ways, the term “church growth” feels like something from the 1980s. When I think of church growth, I conjure up images of VHS tapes in clamshell cases, wire-bound binders full of fill-in-the-blank forms, and lots of charts demonstrating various factors that drive church effectiveness.

I wonder if the idea of church growth has fallen out of the common vernacular of our leadership simply because some of those ideas seem outdated and disconnected from a pastor’s everyday life. I know that thinking through the future of your church and whether it is as effective as it could be isn’t always on the top of most leaders’ to-do lists. Getting this weekend’s message together or dealing with a conflict with the youth pastor typically ranks higher in the list for most leaders than asking what we’re doing to see greater attendance this weekend, let alone later this year. However, there is nothing more important for us to consider today.

Over the last ten years, I’ve had the chance to walk with two leadership teams as their churches died. The amazing part of those stories is that our church had the privilege of participating in the rebirth of those ministries as a campus of our church. However, walking through that process with those leaders was incredibly humbling. Seeing them realize that their ministries had come to an end motivates me to think about how our churches should be reaching more people than ever before to keep our ministries healthy and alive.

I still remember how one of those church leaders leaned way back in his chair, reflected on the past, and declared that he always thought that if his church just kept doing what they had always done, then they would just keep reaching people. They had ridden that train for twenty years, and the church had gone from above 400 in attendance to down below 30.

When another leader realized that things were coming to a close at her church, she asked with some desperation in her voice if I thought there would ever be a time when kids would return to the church. You see, it had been decades since anyone had brought a young person to that church because, frankly, that ministry had left its effectiveness back in the 1960s.

Reflecting on their experience humbles me and leads me to consider my own; it makes me realize that we are only one generation away from complete extinction. With that in mind, we all need to worry about church growth. If we’re not wrestling with and thinking through how to reach more people, then we begin on a slippery slope towards ineffectiveness, which will eventually lead to decline, decay, and death.

When you examine the attendance patterns of these churches that died, you’ll find that there was a time when they thrived. In fact, you can find pictures of full Christmas Eve services besides photographs of Sunday School classes filled with children, and it was at that moment that the church leaders took their feet off the gas and didn’t think about how they were going to continue to reach people. Looking at the interior life of a dying church reveals a humbling realit...