1. Congregational size is inversely related to converting new members, activating the existing membership, and maintaining high membership standards. Small churches are more effective in generating commitment and conformity within a movement.
2. Formal theological training is a secularizing force and feeds the trend towards religious bureaucracy and religious doubt.
3. A fully paid professional clergy is a financial hinderance to the survival of small churches and new church starts.For all of the above reasons, it was the upstart Methodists and Baptists that captured the US frontier, not the resource rich and highly educated Presbyterians, Episcopalians, and Congregationalists.

Long ago the Methodists surrendered to the temptation of respectability. Will the Southern Baptists follow suit? Are the Southern Baptists headed south?

If you want a case study of how it’s done, try the Southern Baptists. I’ve just finished a 1994 article by Roger Finke that shows between 1920 and 1990 the average size of a Southern Baptist church soared from 115 to 396. Impressive.

The other trend he noticed was the dramatic increase in seminary trained professional clergy. Before 1950 the Southern Baptist seminaries produced 10,000 graduates. From 1950-90 the number grew to 60,000.

The Southern Baptists heritage was all about small churches and lay leadership. Today it’s professional staff and large churches.

Bigger churches. Trained clergy. Sounds like a recipe for success.

Maybe.

Lost the trail and wandered through the snow for an hour or so in gale force winds. Terribly irresponsible of me. But lots of fun and I lived to tell the story.

The experience made me think of two recent conversations about the increasing scarcity of church planters. . .

The first with a leader whose denomination has a strong history of multiplying new churches. He was concerned because the younger leaders in their movement aspired not to pioneering but to gaining a position on the team of the larger, successful churches.

The second conversation with a leader in another church planting movement. She and her husband have planted three churches in their ministry together. When I talked to them about helping a new generation plant churches she told me, “I not sure if I can do that. I feel they’d be “cannon fodder”. I’d be sending them out to face possible failure.”

It’s natural to want to gravitate to what is successful. It’s natural to want to protect people from “failure”. It’s also a sign that a movement is transitioning out of it’s dynamic phase and beginning to settle down.

When you’re at the top of the mountain, you’re at the height of your success. You look back and you remember when you had nothing. You remember when you risked it for a cause you believed in. Without the resources, without the know-how. In spite of the opposition.

But now you have accomplishments to protect. Instead of thinking about risk, you think of securing what you’ve achieved. At that point a movement plateaus. Decline has not yet set in, but the rate of advance tapers off.

People who change the world have a cause that is worth risking everything for. Their lives become like grains of wheat that fall to the ground and die and in doing so produce much fruit. They count the cost but consider the rewards worth the risk. They keep climbing the next mountain and the next. . .

Religion is big business in Australia. If it were a corporation, it would be one of the biggest and fastest-growing in the country, accounting for more than $23 billion in revenue in 2005, employing hundreds of thousands of staff (salaried and volunteers) and wielding unsurpassed political and social clout.

Read on. . .

The tone of the article is revealing. It portrays churches as greedy corporations and largely ignores that much of the funds raised go towards education, health and aged care and emergency relief.

The article picks up the rise of the modern Pentecostal movement and its growing financial clout. Some of the larger churches are effectively corporations with turnovers in the millions. There’s also a growing trend for Pentecostals to direct their energies into the business and political worlds with increasing success.

Movements begin on the fringe and then move to the centre. Pentecostalism is moving into the cultural mainstream of Australian society. I expect Australian Pentecostalism to continue to grow and adapt much to the dismay of those on the theological and political left. If history repeats itself, eventually we’ll have a Pentecostal Prime Minister. Meanwhile the secularized mainstream denominations will barely survive on external life support.

Given a generation or two, success may eventually change the Pentecostal movement. As movements shift into the mainstream they become more rational, conformist and risk adverse. Expect “How to speak in tongues” to lose out to “10 Rules for Business Success”. Expect “How to plant a church” to lose out to “Growing what we’ve got bigger”. Expect “brother Ted Smith” to become “Rev Dr Edward Smith”.

Plateaued movements have too big a stake in this world to worry about the next. Led by the clergy, they begin to reflect the views of the cultural and social elites.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that (1) there are exceptions to this trend and (2) God is in the business of raising up new movements—on the fringe.

Here are the consequences for each of the characteristics of dynamic movements.

1. White hot faith
Members of plateaued movements prefer security, social acceptance and prosperity to radical dependence on God. They seek a tamer, more rationalized expression of their faith and begin to interpret the movement’s mission in this-worldly rather than other-worldly terms.

2. Commitment to a cause
Movements emerge because of high levels of dissatisfaction with the status quo. They plateau when members lose their sense of urgency about the need for radical change in the light of a kingdom vision. Plateaued movements increasingly see their mission as protecting what they have gained rather than transforming the world. Discipline becomes lax as members seek a lower level of tension with the surrounding culture.

3. Contagious relationships
There is an increasing reliance on paid professionals to spread the faith and a decreasing reliance on ordinary members and new believers who reach out to their networks of relationships.

4. Rapid mobilization
Religious professionals replace volunteers and the primary workforce. Their role becomes caring for a settled congregation within parish boundaries rather than pioneering new mission among unreached people. The predominant model of church is that of the settled congregation at the expense of the mobile missionary band.

5. Adaptive methods
The environment becomes more formal and complex. Once successful methods become institutionalized. Dissent and diversity are discouraged. Doing things right becomes more important than doing the right things.

There may be some exceptions to the tendency to drift towards Plateau and Decline. I just haven’t come across any.

If you surf a wave all the way to the shore line it eventually dies, you get a long ride but it gradually gets less and less exhilirating, by that time you are so far from the surf you struggle to get back out to where the real big waves are being formed. If you’re on a wave now look for the next one, the one you are on is dying.

Great insight.

Should have some more to say on this in the next day or so.

Here’s the third sure thing. . .

Given enough time, every dynamic Christian movement will plateau and decline. No exceptions.

Why?

“It has shown itself both flexible and resilient enough to be at home with both modernity and its elusive successor, post-modernity.” Allan Anderson

Typically, movements at this stage of development face three challenges. How Pentecostals navigate these challenges will determine whether they will beat the tide of history.

1. Institutionalism
A key to the success of Pentecostalism has been its ability to blend supernaturalism and pragmatism. The intense religious experiences that give rise to new movements would remain fleeting unless they are embodied in some form of effective organisation. This presents every new movement with a dilemma – how to give the “charismatic moment” expression in social forms without extinguishing it.

The most effective and sustained movements live in creative tension of the chaos and creativity of spiritual enthusiasm and the stability provided by effective strategies and structures. Movements that resist this discipline become passing fads.

Dysfunctional bureaucracy creeps in when systems that served us yesterday strangle life today.

It’s a dilemma. You can’t mature and grow as a movement without effective systems. Eventually systems stifle the life and vitality of a movement.

At the heart of the move towards institutionalisation is the longing we all share for security, predictability and control. Bureaucracy results from the desire to create a risk-free environment. The assumption is that regulation, control and inspection will ensure the appropriate outcomes. What they ensure is that people no longer take responsibility or ownership of the movement’s mission. Creativity is lost. Innovative leaders are frustrated.

2. Respectability
Movements begin on the fringe of Church and society. They have nothing to lose and risk everything for a cause whose time has come. The intensity of their faith and commitment places them in tension with the wider Church and culture.

As movements become successful the spiritual experiences that birthed them are tamed in order to fit in with the surrounding culture. A plateaued movement becomes increasingly connected but less distinct from its world. Declining movements have weak and vague concepts of the superrnatural.

This drift is supported and encouraged by an increasingly well-educated, professional clergy. More “reasonable” demands are made on members. Membership standards are relaxed and members become more passive as ministry is placed in the hands of the professionals. Increasingly churches within the movement become cultural and community centres more concerned with social issues than with sin and salvation.

3. Aging
Aging has nothing to do with how many years a movement has been in existence. Aging is about wishing to enjoy and protect what we have achieved rather than add to our accomplishments. In the tension between the real and the ideal, the real finally wins. People make the unconscious decision to enjoy and protect the fruits of yesterday’s efforts.

Success breeds a loss of urgency. As urgency drops off, so does creativity. A loss of creativity inhibits the movement’s ability to change in response to a changing world. The momentum of the past continues to propel the movement forward, but at a declining rate.

These are at least three of the challenges Pentcostalism will face in the midst of its success. When has this happened before? A better question is: When, in the history of the Church, has it not happened? An even better question is: What can be done about it?

Click here for how the early church stumbled at these challenges.

By one estimate, Christianity grew from around 1,000 followers in AD 40 to over six million by AD 300. What began as an obscure Jewish sect, became within three centuries, the strongest and most widely spread organisation other than the state. Ultimately it proved itself even stronger than the state. Unable to stamp the new faith out with persecution, the state gave in and made the church its ally.

“Never in so short a time has any… set of ideas, religious political, or economic, without the aid of physical force or of social or culture prestige, achieved so commanding a position in such an important culture.” “The first five centuries (A History of the expansion of Christianity)” (Kenneth Scott Latourette) , 112.

Christianity spread, primarily as a “network phenomena” through ties of family and friends. The apostles did not function as settled clergy but traveled widely as the links between networks of congregations that were “run by and recruited by local, part-time amateurs.” (Stark)

Constantine’s troops proclaimed him Emperor in Britain in 306. It took him the next six years to gain control of Gaul and Spain. Now it was time to battle his rival Maxentius for Italy. As he led his army south for battle Constantine saw a vision of the cross superimposed on the sun and above the words In hoc signo vince, ‘Conquer in this sign’. He crossed the Alps and marched on towards Rome. Outside Rome before the decisive battle of the Milvian Bridge he had his troops mark their shields with the sign of the cross. Constantine won against all odds. The Christian God had brought him victory. A few months later, in March 313, his “Edict of Milan” put an end to the persecution of Christians and provided their faith with full legal recognition.

Persecution ceased and Christianity became the favoured religion of the Emperor. It had not yet become the official religion of the empire but was the recipient of massive state funding previously channeled to the pagan temples. Humble structures were replaced by magnificent public buildings. Constantine built the Church of St Peter in Rome modeled on the basilican form used for imperial throne halls. The See of Rome received extensive land endowments and an imperial residence to house the Bishop and his staff. Church leaders, once recruited from the ranks and sustained by voluntary offerings suddenly became men of power, status and wealth in the imperial civil service. The result was a stampede into the priesthood. A stampede won by the sons of the aristocracy eager for privilege and exemption from taxation. Bishoprics were bought and sold. Huge bribes were paid to obtain them.

The emperor became actively involved in shaping the life of the Church. He called and presided over church councils, engaging in and attempting to resolve theological disputes. After 300 years of persecution and intolerance, Christians had finally been accepted into mainstream society.

The Church honored its part of the arrangement by praising Constantine as the model Christian emperor, the ‘friend of God’ who “frames his earthly government according to the pattern of the divine original.” (Eusebius) No mention is made of the fact that this model Christian emperor had murdered his father-in-law, wife and son.

Why should the sun-worshipping Constantine interest himself in an alliance with the Christian faith? Christianity had become so widespread that Tertullian (c. 200) could argue that if they were a subversive sect they could easily take over the empire by force. Not only was Christianity numerous, it was organised, universal, multi-racial and lead by an increasingly well-educated clergy. It has even begun to amass property. Christianity had become a force for stability in the empire. Its ideology fitted neatly into the aims and needs of the universal state. A marriage of convenience with the bride of Christ was an attractive proposition for Emperor Constantine.

Christianity now grew dramatically as a result of it favored position in society. Success altered the character of the faith that now blossomed.

“From a popular mass movement, supported by member donations and run by amateurs and poorly paid clergy, under Constantine Christianity was transformed into an elite organisation, lavishly funded by the state and bestowing wealth and power on the clergy. Thereupon church offices became highly sought by well-connected men, whose appointments greatly reduced the average Christian leader’s level of dedication.”“One True God : Historical Consequences of Monotheism” (Rodney Stark), 61.

The nature of Christian mission changed. Within the empire, coercion, legal decree and force replaced persuasion, lifestyle and relationships as methods of conversion. Dissent by non-conforming pagans or “heretics” was not tolerated. The Church now wielded the sword in pursuit of its mission. Christianity had identified itself with Graeco-Roman civilisation. By 500 AD, the vast majority within the empire called themselves Christian. The new leadership of the Church had no interest in taking the Gospel to the “barbarians” beyond the empire.

The responsibility for missions was now limited to the dedicated few within the monastic movement. The dominant method was to reproduce the model of Contantine’s conversion through the baptism of kings and the imposition of the Christian faith by force. A model of mission that lasted for over one thousand years.

Sobering reading for any movement at the height of success.

“One True God : Historical Consequences of Monotheism” (Rodney Stark)