Redemptive Stewardship Practices
Article originally hosted and shared with permission by The Christian Economic Forum, a global network of leaders who join together to collaborate and introduce strategic ideas for the spread of God’s economic principles and the goodness of Jesus Christ. This article was from a collection of White Papers compiled for attendees of the CEF’s Global Event.
by Nick Bonner
The Stakes Are High
A recent report commissioned by the Pinetops Foundation, titled The Great Opportunity, found that between now and 2050 over 40 million youth (Millennials and Gen Z) in America who were raised in Christian homes are likely to disaffiliate from the faith of their parents. However, if the church can help them engage with Christ at rates from just two decades ago, over 20 million will come to know a life with Jesus. To put it in perspective, that is more than the combined total of every revival and Billy Graham crusade in US history! We are literally at the brink of the greatest opportunity for evangelism and discipleship in US history and, based on the age at which youth determine their religious beliefs, the window of opportunity for Millennials is closing quickly.1
One of the five most catalytic strategies the report recommends is to find a way to triple church planting, promoting it as the single most effective method for reaching the unchurched. This goal is entirely attainable, but it will take much more than pastors and planters to address this challenge. It will take redemptive stewardship, or what Stan Dobbs refers to as “Businistry.”
Do We Really Need More Church Plants?
The data strongly suggests yes. Currently about 4,000 Christian churches are planted annually in America. That may sound like a big number, but it is only about a quarter of the number of churches planted per capita in the 1800s. With the current church closure rate at about 3,700 per year, 4,000 plants are not enough to keep up with population growth or immigration; the number of church closures is forecasted to increase to 5,500 per year within the next decade. Keep in mind that only about 68% of the aforementioned church plants succeed and the need to double or ideally triple, our current rate of church plants to 11,200 for the next 30 years becomes apparent.
Don’t Church Plants Cannibalize Existing Churches?
The simple answer is no. Consider the following statistics:
The average well-trained, and equipped church plant will grow to an average of 250 weekly participants within four years. Of those, 42% (or almost half of the congregation) will be comprised of previously unchurched or unaffiliated people.
The average church 10 years of age and over has an 89:1 ratio of congregants to conversions. Churches 3 to 9 years of age have a 7:1 ratio. And, churches under 3 years of age have an astounding 3:1 ratio of congregants to conversions.3 There is something systemic in the inherent life cycle of a church that, unless it is replanted, will eventually turn inward— prioritizing programs and churched people over evangelism.4
The relationship between the number of churches to churchgoers is exponential, not linear:
If there is one church for every 10,000 residents, then ~1% of the population will attend.
If there is one church for every 1,000 residents, then ~15-20% of the population will attend.
If there is one church for every 500 residents, then ~40% of the population will attend.5
Put differently, the more churches someone sees, the more relevant and inviting the prospect of entering one becomes. The greater the supply, the greater the demand. Case in point, Starbucks.
So Why Aren’t We Planting More Churches?
The problem is that the average cost of a middle-class church plant in the US ranges from $250K–$500K which, when multiplied by the 11,200 church plants we ideally need, equates to roughly $2.8–$5.6 billion annually. While we serve a mighty God with limitless resources, the status quo is not a practical annual fundraising expectation for church planting. We need to dramatically lower the barriers of entry for planting new churches and, in many cases, reconsider how we operate church entirely.
The church needs Kingdom-minded leaders to innovate and solve these challenges. We need to sacralize our business practices and leverage the massive trust of human capital we have sitting in the pews to start thinking of stewardship as something far beyond tithing. Perhaps one way we could start leading the charge is with our most visible, underutilized, and sacred place: the church building itself. But first, please humor me with a brief etymology in order to lay the theological backdrop.
What Is a Church?
The word “church” comes from the Gothic (or Germanic) word kirika, which became kirche in modern German, meaning “house of the Lord” or a ritual gathering place. But the original Greek word for church was “ekklesia,” which was a simple gathering or assembly of people for a specific purpose. My point, or rather Andy Stanley’s point, is that Jesus’ church was never meant to be a location or a building. It has and always will be a people.6
The implications of this are huge. Churches don’t just have to meet in buildings with steeples. They could meet in offices, hotels, event centers, movie theaters, and coffee shops. While traditional church goers love a 9 and 11 AM Sunday morning service, what if we gathered at other times instead? What if Jesus could be found in community gatherings seven days a week?
There is much I would like to unpack about how this opens up the opportunity for us to support the church in all of her forms, be it mega, multi-site, or micro, but for the purpose of this paper I want to focus specifically on one idea for a pivot to the traditional model.
Is the Current Model Really Broken?
Four years ago, the City of San Diego forced my church out of our building because the zoning changed and we had not previously secured a permit. I volunteered to help my church find a new location, having worked and invested in commercial real estate for the last 15 years. It was the hardest assignment of my career. From zoning to parking to ceiling heights to floor plans, church facilities are highly specialized and expensive. As a result, attractive facilities are very difficult to come by and rarely meet the budget, which makes finding the right facility a huge hurdle for churches of all sizes. The church-in-a-box model is not sustainable either. The lack of permanence and hours of set-up and tear down every Sunday take a toll on the volunteers, which is why this model has a limited shelf life. Occupying a facility is just the beginning of the problem.
Consider the following statistics:
The average church building is only fully utilized about 5% of the week.
Over 90% of most church budgets are geared towards a Sunday experience.7
Totaling the cost of buildings, programs, and salaries, we spend approximately $1.5 million for every baptism in the US.8
With stewardship like this, it is no surprise that roughly 80% of the churches in America are in plateau or decline. Sadly, this isn’t just an American problem, nor is this a model that will get any easier in the future.9 Currently, 69% of all charitable donations come from people above the age of 49, and studies anticipate church income falling by 60–70% over the next 30 years based on the Millennial generation’s giving history.10 11 12 How can we expect Christians to shed the consumeristic, country club church mindset when everything about the Sunday experience is structured that way? I’m convinced that this is part of what is turning off our youth. However, what if we could change church to make a statement that it is not a building, it is a people? We need to balance our “come and see” approach with the “go and be” approach in Matthew 28:19.13 Jesus went to public gathering places like wells, markets, synagogues, and forums to meet people where they were. As Daniel Cook says, “we need to become fishers of men and not keepers of aquariums.”14 My friends, we need a new model. Perhaps a lot of new models.
A “Businistry” Idea
The two biggest line items in a church budget are staff and real estate, which comprise roughly 97% of most church budgets.15 What if we could substantially reduce those while meeting the practical needs of the surrounding community and increasing the amount of people that set foot inside the church? What if we lowered the real estate barriers of entry for church planters to the extent that we could open the door for far more pastors to be bi-vocational? What if multiple churches could share the same building and not only reduce their costs of occupancy but use that cost savings to collaborate and reach their local community together? I think there is an incredible opportunity to live out John 13:35 and John 17:23 through the way we utilize our real estate. Can you imagine what would happen if multiple monoethnic churches shared a building and intentionally found ways for their ministries to strategically address the needs of their non-Christian communities? What edification would take place as our cultures and theology intertwined? What if these churches were held to a standard of ministering “through” their congregation as opposed to ministering “to” their congregation?16 How many millennials and Gen Zers would be inspired by the relevance of the church and become part of the 42% of the congregants in these church plants?
These are questions that have consumed the last nine months of my life. While this plan is in the early stages of development, there is a way to subsidize the costs of the facility with preschools, coffee shops, coworking, events, sports, hotels, and many other uses that the surrounding community would be drawn to utilize throughout the week. This in turn would create “people flow,” which creates opportunity for divine collisions and community with people who might not otherwise set foot inside a church building. Daniel Cook Architect, Mission Based Solutions, and Lionheart Academy are a few of the groups pioneering some of these concepts. They are doing great work figuring out not only how to unlock church buildings seven days a week but also how to create sustainable business models that redeem church facilities to their highest and best use for the Kingdom. But we need many more people involved. We need Christian investors and professionals willing to collaborate with the church using their businistry gifting to their fullest potential in order to curate radical new models of redemptive social enterprise. The stakes are high and the great opportunity of businistry awaits us.
1 The Great Opportunity (www.greatopportunity.org) (Pinetops Foundation).
2 Ibid.
3 Bob Logan, training material for The Church Multiplication Center.
4 William Mallick, Kenneth Priddy, and Steven Ogne, training material from Fresh Start: A Missional Road Map For Restarting Ministry (2016).
5 Timothy Keller, “Center Church” (Redeemer City to City, 2012).
6 Andy Stanley, Deep and Wide, (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2016).
7 Daniel Cook, 10 Tsunamis Impacting Ministries: How do we survive what’s coming? (Ogden, UT Building God’s Way Services, 2015).
8 David Barrett and Todd Johnson, World Christian Trends (Pasadena, CA William Carey Library, 2001)
9 Mark Clifton, Reclaiming Glory (2016).
10 Cook, op. cit.
11 Clifton, op. cit.
12 Carol Fleck, “The Boomers Most Generous at Charitable Giving” (AARP Money Talk, August 8, 2013).
13 Clifton, op. cit.
14 Cook, op. cit.
15 Ibid.
16 Mallick, et. al., op. cit.