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Why More Programs May Be Making Your Church Less Healthy - Week 9

  Week 9 of the Small Church Guys series: Healthy Things Grow—A Biblical and Global Approach to Natural Church Development Churches often respond to problems by adding something. Attendance is down. Add an outreach event. Volunteers are tired. Launch a recruitment campaign. Families are struggling. Start a marriage ministry. Young people are disconnected. Create a youth program. Discipleship feels shallow. Add another class. Community engagement is weak. Schedule another service project. Sometimes a new ministry is exactly the right response. But sometimes the church does not need more. Sometimes it needs less. More programs can create the appearance of health while quietly weakening the congregation underneath. A church can become busier and less fruitful. More active and less focused. More organized and less sustainable. More impressive and less alive. Natural Church Development repeatedly distinguishes real health from superficial activity. Its training emp...

The Six Growth Forces: Learning How Living Things Develop - Week 8

  Week 8 of the Small Church Guys series: Healthy Things Grow—A Biblical and Global Approach to Natural Church Development A church is not a machine. That may sound obvious, but much of modern ministry can unintentionally treat the church as though it were one. Machines are built. Machines are assembled. Machines are controlled. If a machine stops producing the desired result, we replace a part, adjust a setting, add power, or redesign the system. Living things are different. Living things grow. They develop. They reproduce. They adapt. They depend upon relationships with other living things. They use available resources. They experience seasons. They produce fruit. And perhaps most importantly, life cannot simply be manufactured from the outside . This distinction sits near the heart of Natural Church Development. During the first seven weeks of this series, we have repeatedly returned to one central conviction: Healthy things grow. We have explored the eight...