Some time ago I was extolling the beauty and power of the Orthodox Divine Liturgy at a gathering of missiologists. After my presentation one of the other participants asked, “if the Liturgy is really all that beautiful and powerful, then why aren’t the Orthodox Churches filled to overflowing?” Of course, anyone who has experienced an Orthodox Liturgy would be hard pressed to deny its overwhelming beauty. But, the questioner did make a valid point and I find myself unsettled by the apparent discrepancy between the ideal of liturgical beauty and the actual number of participants drawn to the Liturgy. I ask myself why it seems so hard to get people to come, why more don’t respond to our invitation to “come and see,” and why even the faithful aren’t more faithful. If, as we rightly claim, the Liturgy really is beautiful and attractive, wouldn’t more people attend, wouldn’t more flock to experience it? And if they did, wouldn’t we experience more church growth, our parishes constantly increasing in membership?

Simply asking these questions puts me in the good company of thinkers, who over the last half-century have explored what they call the growth of the church. The study of this aspect of the church was born of a dissatisfaction, similar to my own, when in the 1930’s, Donald McGavran noticed the lack of numerical growth among his organization’s mission stations in India. As he studied the situation, he developed a series of principles which he claimed would bring the missing growth. These included numerical growth as the mark of a healthy church and the need for social scientific research to determine existing growth patterns, to predict future growth, and to develop the strategies for doing whatever it would take to facilitate that growth. Driven by a desire for numerical success, these ideas caught on and were brought to North America in the middle of the 20th century, where the fierce pragmatism of the market place became the source of even more aggressive activism and ever new techniques for growth. Today church growth in America is a booming business replete with seminars, conferences, consultants, and, of course, publications.

In spite of all of this activity, the growth of American churches has not been very impressive. I recently looked at church growth data for 2000-2014 collected by the University of Chicago’s National Congregational Survey and it revealed several things. Mainline churches (Baptists, Methodists, Lutheran, Presbyterians), which are the very groups that enthusiastically embrace and apply church growth teaching, all showed a decline, in some cases a steep decline, in membership. The survey also showed that there are still a few mega groups (mostly non-denominational) that are growing. These are the groups that have taken church growth thinking to the next level and are now applying straight business practices in the church with the help of books like Marketing for the Church and techniques like branding. One could just as easily conclude that they are growing because they have in fact become businesses to which one can indeed effectively apply business principles. Even so, according to the same study in 2012, churches with over a thousand participants only represent 2.4% of the total number of North American churches, while 66.8% have between fewer than 250 worshipers (Cf. David T. Olson,  The American Church in Crisis : Groundbreaking Research Based on a National Database of over 200,000 Churches.  Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 2008). So, no, I don’t think doing all of this Church growth business has been working very well. In fact, I have seen first hand the damage this approach has done to pastors and churches.

The reason for all this may be that most of these efforts at growth are actually focusing on the wrong things. Perhaps we have to shake the fascination with numerical growth in order to get at the real potential of ecclesial maturity. I believe that some of the church growth authors are aware of this and are exploring alternatives. They readily admit that it is not simply a numbers game and suggest that that idea is a misrepresentation of the movement’s thought. One author indicates that his book is not about the how, that is the doing of ministry, but rather the whys or the being of ministry. In other words, he seems to imply that being the Church is more important than doing the Church. But what becomes evident in the reading of this book is that whatever misgivings the author might have about the fundamental ideas of the church growth theory, what he comes up with is clearly informed by a persistent desire for one thing, namely numerical growth. In another book the authors promise not to trouble the reader with marketing gimmicks and salesmanship. Yet, near the end of it they openly promote the standard Church growth principle that scientific analysis can and should be used to facilitate the numerical growth of the Church. They even give an unabashed apologetic for using a survey instrument offered by their company, which they will analyze for a price. One has to be impressed by the strength of this underlying idea. It is so powerful that every biblically and theologically sound principle, many of which can be found in these books, are amended or transformed into something that is designed to yield numerical growth. Thus, the really promising idea of being the Church dies amidst the many suggestions on how to do the church in North America.

However, what if these authors’ suspicions are right? What if being and not doing was the one factor that determines the Church’s life, potential, and mission in the world? What I am suggesting is that a parish that is deriving its very existence from the divine source of life is actually a Church no matter what external conditions or circumstances it faces or exhibits. In other words, it is communion with Christ that determines the Church’s nature, its unity, its goodness, its beauty, its integrity, and not the structures imposed on it, not market conditions, or the doings of the proponents of numeric growth. Being the Church is not dependent on temporal circumstances for its ecclesial status. If a group of people is actually the Church, then the gradient from unhealthy to healthy, dying to living, declining to grow, is irrelevant to its being a Church. Simply being the Church brings it under the Lordship of Christ and makes it beautiful and healthy. Its existence, not its condition, is the ecclesially determining factor.

If all of this is true, then the very first question we need to be asking is whether or not a particular group really is a Church. After all, how can something that is not the Church experience churchly growth, i.e., grow as the Church. History and tradition show us that the Church is constituted by the gathering of believers to celebrate the Eucharist presided over by a priest duly ordained by a canonical bishop. This theological context is of utmost importance to an Orthodox understanding of church growth because it is the Church’s unique nature that determines the nature of its growth and thus what standards we will use to measure that growth. Unfortunately many church growth thinkers seem to bypass this question and simply assume that the group they are studying is Church, taking it upon themselves to define its nature and thus the nature of its growth as they see fit. In other words, bracketing the question of the Church’s being (its ontology), removes the constraints imposed by its nature and frees the individual to use any standard of success available (such as the prevailing idea of profit and loss) and any techniques  (marketing, branding, statistical analysis) deemed effective in achieving that kind of success. But, ignoring the fundamental nature of Church leads to an attempt to manage non-essential  (as in not belonging to its character) aspects of its being by means of supposed growth—producing techniques before establishing its existential viability as Church and thus the ways in which it can actually grow. In other words, we wind up just doing, that is managing an organization, rather than being the Church.

So I am wondering if it is the best we can do. I realize that simply criticizing other models won’t do. In order to make a real contribution to the discussion, you would have to offer an alternative, not a new technique, but a revised vision of an Orthodox approach to mission, evangelism, and the growth of the Church. I think this will involve a thorough reevaluation of what it means to be a Church, what that implies for the type of growth we can and should expect, and how that determines how we might go about nurturing that kind of growth. It means rededicating ourselves to the teaching that part of what makes the Church the Church, is the unity (one), goodness (holy), beauty (catholic), integrity (apostolic) that is created by God himself and not the conditions or structures imposed on it by its socio-cultural context, the market place, or even the theoreticians of growth. This could be the foundation of a renewed Orthodox perspective on growing the Church.

https://blogs.ancientfaith.com/growingthechurch/revisiting-the-question-of-growth/