Pastoring with Integrity in a Market-Driven Age
A Leadership Forum with Brian Larson, Lyle Schaller, and Kent Hughes.
July 1, 1997
In a market economy, the company with the best product, price, and service gets the customer. Such is the nature of competition.
Few put it in such crass terms, but increasingly, the American church also operates in a highly competitive environment. Gone are the days of denominational loyalty. Many people today church-hop till they drop. One church member who decided to attend elsewhere brazenly said, "My wife and I want to be in a larger church that doesn't need us to be involved so much."
Where does all this leave pastors? Just ask the person who may feel the competition most acutely—the pastor of the small church located a few miles from a megachurch.
Leadership did just that. We invited Craig Brian Larson, a bi-vocational pastor who serves Lakeshore Assembly of God in downtown Chicago, Illinois, a congregation of thirty-five, to talk about ministering in a small church in a highly competitive church market. We also invited to the discussion well-known church-consultant Lyle Schaller, author of The Interventionist (Abingdon), and large-church pastor Kent Hughes, who serves College Church in Wheaton, Illinois, and who wrote Liberating Ministry from the Success Syndrome (Tyndale).
Larson, Schaller, and Hughes gave Leadership an earful about what this new competition requires of today's pastor.
Most pastors say, "We don't compete with other churches for members;
we're interested only in the non-churched."
Lyle Schaller: Forgive me, but that's not quite the real world. In
95 percent of churches, the majority of new members received last year into
fellowship identified themselves as Christians when they walked through the
door the first time.
Kent Hughes: Only a small percentage of our new members are conversions
in ...
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