Growing a church with four Es

Seven years ago, I became the minister of an evangelical church in a mainstream denomination in the suburbs. It’s not a very flash part of town. The area is mostly working class, but there are a high number of tertiary-educated people around—teachers, managers, nurses, tradespeople and so on.

The church was in decline. When I started, it was going to be out of money in six months. I had to let the assistant minister go. Lots of key members had moved away. There was a real power vacuum; the church was full of followers, not leaders. Furthermore, they hadn’t run an evangelistic event of any sort for ten years. But the church was serious about change.

I wanted to make this an outward-looking church—outward looking in terms of getting to know people, inviting them along to stuff, and creating ideas, places and things where they could initially meet people and share the gospel with them.
 I wanted them to work together and view each other as a team. I wanted them to value other members and their gifts.

So at my first Parish Council meeting, I showed them David Mansfield’s unpublished Discipleship Program (well, at least my dumbed down version of it). Mansfield says that people go through different stages in their journey towards becoming mature Christians: they start off as complete outsiders who don’t know any Christians and who have never been to church. These are the people we need to engage. Then we want to evangelize those we know, establish them in the faith and equip them to minister to others. I showed the council this diagram and talked through it:

Then I asked them whether they thought our church was good at doing all four of these stages. They said no. I said, “Okay, let’s brainstorm. Think of churches you know: where would you put that big charismatic church down the road? What are they good at?” They said, “They’re very good at advertising, they have a big front door, lots of people know about them—so I guess they’re good at Engaging.”

“What about the church with two-hour sermons on some doctrine like the Trinity? Where would you put them?” I said. “Well, they’re all Christians, they’ve got a solid understanding, but they haven’t understood that they’re supposed to be equipped for ministry to serve other people. So it’s sort of ‘Equipping’, but failing.”

I said, “Where do you think our church fits?” They said, “We don’t know. What do you think?” I said, “Everyone is stuck in zone three—‘Establishing’: they 
became Christians years ago and they’ve been marking time ever since. They’ve never understood that the Christian life is about glorifying God, serving him however you can, reaching out to the lost and getting on with the job.” They agreed with me.

I said, “Whatever we do, we’ve got to try and be the church that’s good at doing all four! No church has ever pulled it off, but I want us to give it a good crack.” They all laughed at that.

At the next Parish Council meeting, I came back and said, “Here’s my plan: there are four terms in the year, so let’s devote each term to one of those four stages. We’ll do Engaging in Term 1, Evangelizing in Term 2, Establishing in Term 3 and Equipping in Term 4.” So that’s what we did, and that’s what we kept doing for the next seven years.

However, in order to prepare for Evangelism in Term 2, there were a few things we needed to do. I asked them, “If you looked around and thought about church from the view of an outsider, what would you notice?” We all walked down the street and had a look. They’d never noticed that there was a Bougainvillea plant growing in front of the church sign, so you couldn’t read it and you couldn’t see the church building from the street; it just looked like a shadowy old house. I met people in the community early on who didn’t know that anyone actually used the church. People park at the back of church, and being insiders, they know to walk through from the back. Twenty years ago, they planted a garden at the front around two huge gum tree stumps to disguise them, but weeds and vines had grown up over the stumps so they were just these hideous things. The first thing we did was rip out the stumps. Then we painted the church hall inside up to about head height before we ran out of paint.

When we finished the hall, it looked nicer. I said we needed to celebrate; why didn’t we hold some evangelistic dinners in Term 2? So we had seven potluck dinners, watched John Dickson’s Life of Jesus together and had some discussions afterwards. People really enjoyed it. But it was all church people. I’d said that we should invite people along and I told them who I was praying for, but non-Christians didn’t come.

Then about the third or fourth week, one young couple witnessed a car accident in the Aldi supermarket parking lot: a young Muslim couple had been smashed into by this outrageous, loudmouthed guy, who abused them for parking in the car spot. The Christians who witnessed it went up to the Muslim couple and said, “It’s that guy’s fault. Can we help you? We’ll be your witnesses.” They replied, “This is lovely. We’ve never met an Australian before.” The Christian couple then asked them, “Do you want to come for dinner tonight? It’s in the church hall. It’s a Christian thing and you’ll get to meet some of our friends.” The Muslim couple turned up in full gear. That just shocked everyone—getting a Muslim along to church. It helped people get the idea that you could bring someone along who you thought was going to be an enemy and hate you. You can invite your friends! So we had a couple of friends invited to the last couple of dinners.

The whole church was in on the four Es from early on. I called all the Bible study, youth group and Sunday School leaders together and said, “This is what we’re doing. I’m not going to make you do this, but it would be really excellent if your group could try some type of engaging or evangelism thing in Terms 1 and 2. Try and run one evangelistic event. Have a dinner party. Go and hang out with friends with the intent of talking with them about Jesus. We can help you think up ideas.” Two of the four Bible study groups agreed, as well as the youth group.

I also asked them to use Bible study material in Term 3 about basic Christian living (Establishing) and, in Term 4, to do something harder, like study an Old Testament book to stretch them in Bible understanding (Equipping).
But I still wanted them to invite unbelievers during all three terms. (No-one was to be invited in Term 1; this incentivizes Terms 2 to 4.)

When I arrived, there were 84 adults and 10 kids. Now there are 150 adults and 20 kids. Around 190 call themselves regular, but some only come one out of three Sundays.

It didn’t all work immediately. Some sat on the sidelines to see if it would all fall over. The key was to break it all down into simple steps: what if one person leads one other to Christ over two years? What if those two then do the same? We had to get in and prove things could happen with simple things.
 We’ve also had to recruit new people into leadership so as not to overburden the current leaders. We have disenfranchised power brokers by creating new ministries and putting the focus there, rather than being in maintenance mode. Lately, resistance has come from people thinking we are moving too fast. I’ve had to convince them to let me have a stab at it and watch.

In 2010, we set the goal of having 1500 regulars by 2020. That means five weekly church services, two new church plants, 50 growth groups, a staff team of ten pastors, plus admin staff and apprentices, and a budget of $1.5 million. Our church is on the edge of a massive population expansion: soon there will be 300,000 new people five minutes from us. We have to take responsibility for Christianizing these suburbs.

So we have choices to make: to reach 1500, will we go for three large congregations of 500 each, or 30 congregations of 50 each? Both are costly and difficult in terms of property. Anyone can run a church of 50, but church venues and housing will be hard. We’ve agreed we should be a hybrid and so are developing a bigger building and hall, as well as thinking about planting churches.

I am a major limitation to the vision. I’m not experienced in planting churches. I’m not sure I can hold a network of churches together. We’re now at a size where people can’t know me very well. I will have to change as much as anything else. I only really know how to grow from a small base to whatever we are now.

But I’ve learned how powerful having some clear aims can be. I’ve learned how to break down things into steps that look achievable—for example, removing tree stumps in the church’s front yard and encouraging people to think about leading at least one person to Christ. Every step is hard; even starting one new Bible study group is a challenge. But God has been very good to us and has given us growth.