Gary McIntosh holds several degrees, two of which are a Ph.D and a D.Min from Fuller Theological Seminary. He is best known for his work in the area of church growth and ministry. His areas of research range from pastoral ministry to generational change. McIntosh is affiliated with the Academy for Evangelism in Theological Education, the Society of Church Consulting, and the Great Commission Research Network. As well as publishing Growth Points, he has authored a plethora of books and articles. His most recent work is What Every Pastor Should Know: 101 Indispensable Rules of Thumb for Leading Your Church. It goes without saying that he is recognized as the “church growth expert.” Statement of Purpose McIntosh desires that Taking Your …show more content…
This makes sense as readers come understand that the church is made up of living members, therefore the church itself is a living organism. The life cycle of the church is known as St. John’s Syndrome. McIntosh illustrates this phenomenon by using a bell curve, moving through all the stages of life. St. John’s Syndrome has patterns and characteristics that are easily recognized and occur at predictable times. McIntosh spends the rest of time in part one introducing the reader to the various stages of church congregational lifecycle. Readers learn what key characteristics are so that they are able to analyze their own congregations. McIntosh presents several challenges that must be overcome as well. Readers also learn how to lead their church congregations during times of growth to avoid decline, looking for “choice points.” McIntosh discusses the different stages of church growth in part two. The chapter divisions are based on the size of a church: 15 to 200, 200 to 400, 400 to 800, 800 to 1,500, and 1,500 plus. Within each chapter McIntosh provides key characteristics and key points of transitions. As one move throughout the chapters they come to understand that things must change if a church is to grow. For example, a small church will have a relational pastor who does a great job making his congregation feel welcomed, while a larger church needs a pastor who leads like a manager. As the church grow they will not be able to be as relational
This class has been such a blessing to my life, and it is an honor to create this discipleship strategy for my future ministry. It is the job of the leader of the church to evaluate the spiritual growth of the church, and one of the ways to do this is by measuring expansion growth. This is a tricky subject because there are a lot of ways to define growth. There is transfer growth, which is the swapping of church members from a different congregation. This type of growth is good, but not the best type of growth. While many churches want to see their numbers increase, creating a church that takes away people from surrounding churches is not an ideal term for growth, because no new life change is happening. Tender growth is where people begin
Turnaround And Beyond consist of eight chapters that are intended to provide the reader with practical insights and principles from men and women who have led their congregations through renewal. Crandall stresses the importance of leadership right from the start. It is implied that a successful renewal is dependent on how well a congregation is led throughout the process. He analyzes principles from the business world, the Bible, and Church
Congregational churches can confuse the roles of deacons and elders, in a way that people may question is his function to serve or as a person who goes to board meeting. For a congregational structure is a difficult function in a large church. With this form of church government members can reject or question any form of church leadership and authority. This can lead to the churches getting rid of its pastors or people from the church board. Some of the decisions of the church are made from the vocal feelings of one person’s convincing feelings, instead of thought out considerations.
Let’s see what a spiritual leader can do and how Kotter’s theory of change can be applied at the Church Organization level. One important starting point in dealing with a
Starting a church and building a church was a lot harder than I expected. Many of our projects and efforts just did not work. But I tried to take the high road. “Well that didn’t end the way I expected, but at least no one important died.“
This chapter is Jim Lynn’s call to the church to WAKE UP! He uses an organization of a factitious church complied by his many years of observation and personal experience (p. 221). The church is dying from the inside but a change is about to take place. In the beginning, the church was full of excitement, as with any new local body of believers. A building was built, a pastor was called, and attendance grew steadily. The church became a “rock” in the community offering many different programs. “As time went on, the church begin to lose its flavor. What started out with the freshness of new beginnings begin to fade, and the church began to decline in membership.” (p. 223) A number of the congregation became sick with many different diseases,
The reality of full churches and choir stalls, lively Sunday schools, and overflowing basements is dead in today's Church. The unexpected has happened. Christ's followers, gripped by fear, are now scattered, or remain silent. Parishes, at worst, carry on blindly, or at best, look for comfortable compromises and expediency. They ignore cultural diversity in general. The rhetoric of denial continues to pour out of parish bulletins, newsletters, and diocesan and national journals. It is status quo.
Replanting of a church is truly hard work and this is through experiencing this on a personal level by working for Woodville Church of Christ as from last year in the month of July trying to assists the church in growing and also in replanting. The bible states that “nothing shall become impossible when with God,” (Luke 1:37 NKJV). The task that lies in hand of replanting a new church is not practically impossible but it is usually very overwhelming to anyone trying to engage in it. The church in Woodville has a very conservative and traditional member base which is normally more than 50 members in total and is inclusive of a very young couple that attends the church services. To total number of children that attend the church services are only around 3 to 4 and are mainly the members’
Robert Morris writes a book about the essentials of Church growth and it's development. Having made that statement, the book achieves its own manner of possessing small nuggets of wisdom. Although, that pill was extremely hard to want to swallow as Robert Morris' book is comprised of the typical attitude of mega church pastors even down to the organizational community approach needed to guide a church, all of this is exceedingly evident in part three. The premise of this book is good that we would want our church's to be blessed and be a blessing. Though the premise was good and had good intention, he tends to have shortsighted view based upon the way he envisions church versus the holistic view of what church should be as a whole.
The risk for organizations during this phase is to assess for good yet a limited set of qualities in potential church planters. Current tools are helpful, but they are lacking. What they are lacking causes a problem because what is missing in the gap is not emphasized during the earliest stages of church planter formation. What is being emphasized, in other words, assessed is being communicated as a value such as skills, ability, knowledge but what about a planter’s posture towards God, the church, and culture? Church planting organizations will often teach and train about what the purposes of the church are and what the planter needs to do in those areas but without an assessment of their current preferences
Steering Through Chaos serves as a personal mentoring experience where leaders can experience the challenges and victories of organizational change vicariously through Pastor Scott Wilson's narrative of church growth. The underlying premise of the book is that great leaders do not lead through change, instead, they steer their organizations into the change process. This exercise rests on the leader's proficiency in discerning phases of organizational development and managing the potential energy of present growth to catapult the organization into another growth cycle. One's aptitude for predicting and implementing growth renewal is contingent on the leader's ability to continually increase their capacity for leadership, impart the vision and core values of the organization to a guiding coalition, and minimize the frustration of
Church growth is a topic that very few church members discuss unless the church falls into a steep decline numerically, leaving only a handful of members in a worship service still present. Most of the time, leaders within the church are the only few who focus their time and effort on maintaining a healthy environment, where the church can flourish and grow. This environment is often seen as something that happens inside the four walls of the church but this is a misunderstanding.
One of the issues facing larger churches is the inability for the pastors and ministers to intimately connect and engage with each individual member on a regular basis. While
This week’s journal assignment poses the question in reading about the organization of the church in Chapter 16 of McRay's book, are you confused or comforted by the fact that there does not appear to be one model of organization for every church? McRay writes:
At the time of the attempted change, the church followed the model of many successful “Boomer” churches of the 80s – personality driven, weekend service centric, and largely dependent upon disjointed programs for discipleship and leadership development (Rainier, October 5, 2015). While some attempts had been made to bring the staff and departments into alignment, cohesive vision was surface level at best and a focused unified leadership pipeline remained elusive. The staff team was made up of mainly leaders under 50, with the bulk in their 20s and 30s, and just a few older staff. There existed a strong desire to shift the church culture to a more generationally relevant model. However, at the time, the congregation was dominated by older members (above 50), and didn’t retain young families. Finally, while evangelism had always played a key role in the life of the church, there was very little evidence of a