I was a PhD student at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and Thom Rainer was the dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth. When Thom invited me to join a research project for a book that he was writing, I jumped at the chance.
That 1995 research project looked at 576 growing Southern Baptist churches to determine what made them evangelistic. Part of my responsibility was to tabulate the results of a survey we sent to these churches. Believe it or not, I tabulated the results by recording answers on graph paper in those days. The work was tedious at times, but the book resulting from the study, Effective Evangelistic Churches, quickly caught the attention of pastors and other church leaders.
What most intrigued me about that study was the focus: we studied only churches that were seeing growth through reaching non-believers. The churches we studied at the time were churches that met these criteria, in Thom’s words:
We somewhat arbitrarily decided to examine only those churches whose annual baptismal total exceeded twenty-five for that year. We then determined that a church must have a baptismal ratio (resident members/baptisms) of less than 20:1. In other words, the church was reaching at least one person for Christ for every twenty members.[i]
We have adjusted the criteria over the years in defining an “effective evangelistic church,” but the principle remains the same: we want to make sure we’re studying churches that are growing by conversion growth rather than by transfer growth. That is to say, we study growing churches who are reaching non-believers rather than only swapping sheep with other churches.
And, that’s the insight I gained from Thom so many years ago: church growth studies must focus on studying churches that are actually reaching non-believers. These churches live on the front edge of “make disciples” (Matt 28:19) even as they typically also have intentional discipleship plans to keep those they reach. It’s simply not enough to study growing churches without asking the source of their growth.
What might surprise you, though, is how that insight I gained almost thirty years ago has affected my life since then.
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- As a follower of Jesus, I continually evaluate my own evangelistic efforts. I want to be doing evangelism naturally, but I work hard to make sure I’m building relationships with non-believers, living the gospel in front of them, and speaking the gospel to them.
- As a senior professor of evangelism and missions (which basically means I’m an old prof), I want my students to ask, “If the church I lead is growing, are we growing by reaching non-believers or by transferring in new members?” To not ask the question is to risk getting comfortable with transfer growth.
- As an elder in a local church, I want my church to ask the same question. All of us need to make this question a personal one. To be Great Commission congregations, we must ask if we’re making new disciples through evangelism, baptizing them, and teaching them.
This passion for evangelism that drove Thom years ago still marks him—and consequently, it marks our Church Answers team as well. Our prayer is that we might help you gain that passion, too, if you don’t yet have it.
Oh, and by the way, I (along with help from other Church Answers team members) am working on a new Church Answers resource that tackles evangelism like the original Effective Evangelistic Churches did, so keep watching for it!
[i] Thom S. Rainer, Effective Evangelistic Churches. Kindle Edition, loc. 481-511.
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