Don’t get hung up on church numbers — focus on church health, not size
- Dr. Harry Reeder: The sexual revolution an ‘all-out assault’ on our culture
- British government resignations signal problems
- What Alan Dershowitz’ shunning says about snowflake culture and intolerance for debate
- Why the Supreme Court’s labor union decision is a win for freedom and education
- Parents denied access to public school sex education materials is shocking government overreach
- Leadership crucial in the church, life
- Reflecting on Independence Day and its meaning
- Justice Kennedy’s retirement and what it could mean for the direction of the country
- How the church and strong families can help adolescents deal with depression
- Should sex offenders be able to adopt?
- What the Presbyterian Church (USA)’s General Assembly prayer gets wrong
- Is it just? Farm Bill requires able-bodied on food stamps to work part-time or get job-training
- Is Alabama-founded PCA church encouraging gay people to identify by sin?
- Alabama pastor to the suicidal: ‘Banish the thought of destruction. It’s not the answer’, ‘Many’ of us want to help
- How to think about ‘human rights council’ and elitist concept of abortion as ‘human right’
- Alabama pastor’s analysis of immigrant parent-child border separation controversy
- James Comey echo of J. Edgar Hoover — amassing power, declaring himself moral authority in FBI
- Historic North Korea Summit explainer and backstory
- News Fatigue? How to think about abundance of 24-hr ‘news’
- Where do you turn when your church strays from your faith?
- Unreal — Medical how-to book for counseling ‘religious’ women that abortion is okay
- Remembering RFK
- It’s inexcusable Clinton didn’t personally apologize to Lewinsky
- Planned Parenthood ignores crime in singular pursuit of death culture
- Do we really want a society that says ANY sexual behavior is fine?
- Reflections from Israel — and how it has changed in the past 30 years
- How to think about ‘aging pastors’ and ‘scarcity’ of millennials in ministry
- What does Christian liberty mean?
- Oh boy … Americans don’t think they sin very often
- How ‘church growth at all costs’ mentality weakens worship
- Should Facebook be the ‘new church’ and ultimate hate speech judge?
- How to think about Memorial Day
- When did marriage, parenthood become about self-fulfillment?
- Government branches must hold each other accountable, not circumvent each other
- Why Christians should visit holy lands
- Making sense of Trump’s negotiations
- Why Trump was right to move embassy to Jerusalem
- Stay married through ‘hurricane’ years, struggles — it’s worth it
- Insanity: NYC mayor wants to enable drug use
- Why it’s crucial that parents examine college faculties
- Why Marxism is cool again — with people who don’t know of its horrors
- A pastor’s perspective on Alabama Attorney General’s ‘Faith Forum’ at Briarwood
- Does archaeology prove or disprove the Bible?
- Don’t get hung up on church numbers — focus on church health, not size
- In the U.K., you only have value if you are wanted
- Startling number of Christians are persecuted around the world
- What is North Korea’s motivation?
- PARENTS: Who is teaching your child, the iPad, the teacher you disagree with, or you?
- Alfie Evans and the ever-encroaching overreach of the state, diminishment of parental rights
- Randa Jarrar and free speech
- Proposed California law will lead to persecution of Christians, possible outlawing of Bible sales
- How should Christians think about Trump’s North Korea stance?
- Barbara Bush and the unique legacies First Ladies leave
- Paul Ryan is understandably ‘bone-tired’ — but I do wish he could stay
- Why the Syrian strike was justified
- Christian colleges: Will you fold under cultural pressures or actually BE what you say you are?
- Transgender chaos playing out as predicted
- Does Facebook smoosh conservative posts? YES. But regulation is not the answer
- What Toys ‘R Us, colleges, and social security have in common
- College class gets it terribly wrong. Christians aren’t privileged — Christianity produces privileges for everyone
- Gender chaos leads to societal chaos
- Cultural Marxism: Do you know what it is and how to fight it?
- How parents can combat Planned Parenthood’s shocking deviant sex education
- Sorry and all, but yes there is a Heaven and Hell
- When elected officials campaign on promises they don’t keep
- Does archeology prove the Bible is true?
- Are the millions of lives lost to abortion less important than lives lost to gun violence?
- We must not sacrifice consistent morality for political pragmatism
- Why do Christians call Christ’s death ‘Good Friday’?
- Single parenthood may be a heroic struggle, but it’s not ideal and shouldn’t be promoted
- Freedoms of speech, religion go hand in hand and are being threatened — even in Christian college classes
- States are trying to criminalize the free speech of those seeking to protect unborn life
- Christian movie revenue shocks Hollywood, blows past estimates — here’s why you need to see it
- Care about free speech? Keep your eyes on Supreme Court dealing with California abortion law
- Why pornography is far from ‘victimless’ and how to quit using it
- Cultural Marxists are using schools, courts to target Christianity
- No, Joy Behar, it’s not a ‘mental illness’ when the Lord speaks to us through his Word
- Despite what Washington Post writer says, Down Syndrome children are only undesirable to selfish, arrogant people
- Facebook’s ‘fact checker’ says the killing of unborn babies in abortion is a ‘disputed fact’
- Be sure your (Twitter) sins will find you out
- Reasons for pro-lifers to rejoice — and double-down — on abortion issues
- How to debate with decorum … and why profane, vulgar arguments reveal weak arguments & minds
- WAKE UP: Pornography is not victimless — it destroys lives and kills people
- Persecution, violence against Christians significantly increased world-wide in 2017
- 3 things contributing to the U.S. drop in life expectancy
- Gov’t attempted to silence this Christian who’s bringing Martin Luther King’s fight to modern times
- Iranian Christians fleeing persecution should get U.S. care and refuge
- What we can learn from the Alabama & Georgia quarterbacks’ post-game responses
- What does academic intolerance of real debate mean for free speech?
- Do you know the frivolous programs your tax dollars fund?
- Blaring Bannon coverage begs question: What’s happened to journalism?
- Call to Christians: Engage in politics & evangelism out of love for neighbor
- New York City votes to fine Biblical counselors for gender dysphoria therapy
- 10 campaign promises Donald Trump kept — or attempted to keep — in his first year
- Is it pointless to make New Year’s resolutions?
- The top 11 news, faith and culture headlines of 2017
- American attitudes about children contribute to our shrinking birth rate
- Here’s what Trump got right (and wrong) in his national security speech
- Tax reform explained: How it helps our culture, our families, our economics
- Advent and Christmas, ever wondered what’s the difference?
- Reformed Christians have lost one of their great theologians, pastors
- The 2 ungodly reactions to politics, current events that Christians must avoid
- Want our trust? The 7 things an elected official MUST do to gain it
- Christian voters faced 4 options in Senate race … only 1 is inexcusable, says Evangelical pastor
- Where the death culture leads: Lawsuits over disabled children who ‘should’ have been aborted
- What’s at stake in the Masterpiece Cakeshop Supreme Court decision
- How to put Trump’s U.S. embassy move to Jerusalem in historical and biblical perspective
- Pastor Harry Reeder: There is hope and a way forward for the Matt Lauers in our lives
- Pastor Harry Reeder: If Supreme Court gets Colorado cake baker, same-sex marriage case wrong, it will be culture tipping point
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Liberal ‘Christianity’ is antithetical to Christianity
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Abortion industry ‘doulas’ try to normalize killing of unborn, but we know abortion is not normal
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Trump’s judicial nominee list shows his commitment to originalists and constitutionalists
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Some evangelicals disagree, but here’s why it’s good to emphasize church celebrations during Christmas
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Our military is weakening and here’s why we need it strong
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Why would we be surprised when culture lives out sexual sin it has promoted for years?
- Pastor Harry Reeder: Churches must stay on-mission as evangelists, not cultural acceptance-seekers
- Pastor Harry Reeder: The Museum of the Bible is a great idea…provided we don’t worship the Bible
- Harry Reeder on sexual reckoning: Our conscience tells us ‘something’s wrong here’ even while our culture promotes sin
- Reeder: We have to be honest despite history rewrites– Pilgrims gave thanks to God
- Reeder: It is ‘absolutely ludicrous’ to think a mother’s absence in crucial first 3 years has no effect
- Reeder: Australian same-sex marriage survey a ‘profile in cowardice’ not courage
- Reeder: Believers ‘speaking up’ made real difference in adoption tax credit provision
- Reeder: Secular culture wants more than ‘tolerance’, insists upon abortion and sexual anarchy ‘celebration’
- Reeder on Roy Moore chaos: ‘Do the next right thing’
- Reeder: Here’s what Christians should say when traditional marriage views are labeled ‘bigotry’
- Reeder on church leaders not meeting privately with the other sex: ‘I’ll take the criticism….I learned it from Billy Graham’
- Reeder on LGBTQ campus activists: ‘They don’t want to debate what a marriage actually is. They want to silence those they cannot answer.’
- Yes, it’s ridiculous there’s a new religion dedicated to AI….but here’s why it matters
- Feeling any Christmas guilt? Here’s the type you should ignore and the type you should face
- Reeder on Tuesday’s elections: ‘To see this as a referendum on Trump is overstating it’
- Two terminally-ill patients who refused assisted suicide to help others & show life’s sanctity
- Lots of older pastors, not many young ones — what’s going on?
- Commercial Surrogacy: The objectification of child-bearing
- Elitist ‘gender-isn’t-real’ culture has descended into sophisticated imbecility
- Chaplain who refused marriage retreat to same-sex couple is up against elite culture enforcers
- Sen. Booker’s grilling of Pompeo prime example of ‘religious test’ to exclude evangelical Christians from office
- GENDER ABSURDITY: A nation, led by pop culture, descends into chaos
- How culture rot happens: Unthinkable –> Laughable –> Thinkable –> Accepted
- How Christians should submit to the government’s law
- How to avoid going ‘wobbly’ on the truth
Listen to the 10 min audio
Read the transcript:
CHURCH MEDIAN AGES ARE ALARMING BUT IS THERE A PROBLEM?
TOM LAMPRECHT: Harry, I want to take you to a story of statistics. Statistics never tell the whole story, but they can validate that a story exists. Two simple statistics can help explain the American church: one, the median church size is 75 people and, two, the median church age is 73 years.
DR. REEDER: Tom, now let’s get clarity as this new story also brings clarity. A statistician doesn’t cringe any more than when he hears people say, “Well, the median average is.” Those two terms don’t go together. Median means mid-point. In other words, when you take the churches in the United States of America, the median point of the size of churches is 75. In other words, half of the churches in the United States are above 75 and half are below 75. The median age is 73 — that is, half of the churches in the United States are above age 73 and half of the churches are below age 73. That’s the median point.
And then, out of that, the majority of churches actually have less than 100 people, probably less than 75 people, and that’s where they are in their size. Now, how are we do see that? And, by the way, if you’re a pastor of one of those churches, how are you to look at that?
WHY IS GROWTH IMPORTANT?
We have a ministry, Tom, called “From Embers to a Flame” and “From Embers to a Flame” is taking the Biblically revealed paradigm for church revitalization. How can you lead your church back to healthy vitality and one of the points we make is your objective is not church growth, but it’s church health?
I didn’t tell my children to grow — “I want you to grow three inches” — but what I did was I fed them, exercised them and made sure they got rest. God had a DNA in them of what he had put within them and my job as a parent was not to make them grow. That’s why we don’t give them steroids for false growth. There’s a lot of churches of cultural steroids because they value growth more than health.
Therefore, it’s not big is good and small is bad or small’s good, big’s bad — it’s healthy. You want to be a spiritually healthy, Gospel-vital church. Now, where you’re located, your location and your generation are going to affect that. If I’m in a community that is declining, then likely I can have a healthy church but, actually, the statistics may be decreasing.
KEEP IT ALL IN PERSPECTIVE, NOT JUST ON FLAT NUMBERS
I was with a young man in the ministry and I had gone to do a conference for him and to spend some time with him at his request. And, in our prayer time together, he was weeping and I said, “What’s the problem?” and he said, “I feel like an utter failure.” I said, “Why?” and he said, “Well, when I came here, the church was 250 and now our average attendance is 175.”
This guy pastored in a church that was in a county that is the only county east of the Mississippi River that doesn’t have a traffic light. “What was the population when you arrived here in the county?” “Well, it was around 30,000.” I said, “What’s the population now in the county?” “It’s about 8,000.” The recession that hit the coal mining industry, people had moved out, businesses were shut down and it looked like a ghost town.
I said, “First of all, you’ve got 175 people and when you came it was 250 but, when you came, you had 250 people but there were 30,000 people here. Now you’ve got 175 people but there’s 8,000 people. Well, I’m not a whiz in math, but I do believe 175 out of 8,000 is a higher percentage of people in the country coming to your church than when you came and you had 250 but there were 30,000 people in the county. I could make a case that you’ve actually grown.”
THE BIBLE SHOWS EXAMPLES OF HEALTHY BIG AND SMALL CHURCHES
When I look at the Bible, I see the Bible bringing to us the testimony of a healthy church, not a “big church.” The Bible does not avoid statistics — they’re all over the place in the Book of Acts. When the Bible commends the church at Jerusalem — there are 3,000 and that’s just counting the men and then 5,000 were added and that’s just counting the men. People are being saved every day.
Likely, the church at Jerusalem at one time of those opening salvos of the first generation of the church when James became their pastor, the brother of the Lord, that church probably was somewhere between 14,000 and 18,000 people. Yet, look at the commendation that God gives to churches that are meeting in houses and that the apostle Paul affirms. Go read the Book of Revelation: two churches get a clean bill of health and they’re both house churches.
Therefore, it’s not that God says, “Oh, if you’re big, you’re good. If you’re small, you’re bad. Nor, if you’re small, you’re good and if you’re big, you’re bad.” What you need to see is it’s Gospel health is what you want. Your size, many times, is what will reflect where God has you.
It is said there are certain species of fish from which we get goldfish. The goldfish grows proportionately to the size of the pool that they’re in. Well, so it is with many churches. You can you have Gospel healthy church and there’s only 75 people in a small, rural town. And I praise the Lord for that — we need that.
GOD CHOOSES WHERE HE NEEDS YOU TO MINISTER
Tom, as you know, if I just had my druthers, I would have pastored a small Presbyterian church in a small southern town with a wonderful, laid-back lifestyle — my romantic desire in all of life. That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do, but God has seen fit to put me in other situations where there are larger churches and that’s what He has seen fit to do and that’s fine.
I don’t see myself as a superior pastor because my church is big. I just want to be faithful and I want to be effective. And if God puts you in a place where there’s booming population, well, that’s where you are. If God’s put you in a place where there’s a shrinking population, that’s where you are. What you aim at is effectiveness and church health and, God, give us maturation of longevity — not just we’re hanging around, but we keep growing in the Lord and our next years are even better than the last years. Even though the surrounding population may be shrinking, thereby affecting the size of our church, we’re still reaching our parish.
MAKE SURE YOUR CHURCH IS “WELL” FOR HEALTHY GROWTH
You want to aim at Gospel health and vitality. We call it a WELL Church. A WELL church is a church that:
W — worships with authenticity in spirit and in truth
E — evangelism and missions; you are reaching the lost with intentionality
L — loving one another; “They marveled at how they loved one another”
L — learning church
Therefore, you’ve got worship, that’s our ministry of upreach to God; evangelism, that’s our ministry of outreach to the world; loving one another, that’s our ministry to inreach to one another; then learning, that’s our ministry of downreach to ourselves that we’re being discipled and discipling others. That’s the testimony of vitality.
Normally, when you got a WELL church, just like a physical body grows and is healthy, so will a church grow statistically. In God’s providence, sometimes that statistical growth won’t be there because of the location and the generation, but it’s still a healthy church in that context.
STATISTICS MATTER BUT DON’T LET THEM DEFINE YOUR CHURCH
Now, that doesn’t mean you don’t use the metrics. If the metrics are showing something declining and it’s not explained by the dynamics in the community, then you need to take a look and say, “Wait, wait, wait. This statistic is revealing something is amiss.” But the answer is not to puff up the statistics because your mission is not growth; your mission is to make disciples that are healthy.
And don’t you love it in the Great Commission where it says the disciples of Jesus, when they saw Him after His resurrection, it says they worshipped Him — W. Then He tells them to go — that’s evangelism. Then He tells them to baptize and that’s when believers and their household are enfolded into the body of Christ — when they love one another. And then He says, “Teach them to observe all I have commanded you — that calls for learning with conviction in your life and that’s what we look to the Lord to do.
Therefore, Tom, statistics don’t lie, but liars can use statistics and statistics can lead you to the wrong place if you don’t have the right paradigm. In the ministry, your paradigm is fix your eyes on Jesus, fulfill the Great Commission, live the Great Commandment and then have a great commitment to Christ and then, “God, thank you for where I am. Where I am let me raise a standard. The size of the church will reflect where I am. The health of the church will reflect the grace of God that is greater than our sins.”
Dr. Harry L. Reeder III is the Senior Pastor of Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham.
This podcast was transcribed by Jessica Havin, editorial assistant for Yellowhammer News, who has transcribed some of the top podcasts in the country and whose work has been featured in a New York Times Bestseller.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Subscribe: Google Podcasts | RSS