The Quality Church (Part 1) - Christianity Today

Long years of measuring church growth have left a crucial question largely unanswered: What is the quality of a church that pleases God?

Beyond a prize-winning Crystal Cathedral in Garden Grove, California, or 21,609 conversions in 1981 at First Baptist Church of Hammond, Indiana, or a 10,000-seat sanctuary for Huffman Assembly of God in Birmingham, Alabama, or 275,000 members at Full Gospel Central Church in Seoul, Korea, the question still lurks. The superchurch with a photogenic, magnetic pastor-is it really a church? Is its message the gospel? Is it healthy or just fat? Is bigger better?

The Quest for an Elusive Gauge

Up to now, we have stumbled along with highly subjective methods of evaluating quality. A number of self-appointed church critics have set up personal standards and judged others by them. Such an approach, while widely used in our society to assess drama, art, motion pictures, and vintage wines, has not worked particularly well for analyzing churches.

Many denominations, of course, have corporately drawn up internal criteria. These serve very well to establish and maintain boundaries between themselves and other denominations and also to sustain certain internal levels of religious commitment- both positive factors for maintaining vitality. They are useful for gauging the quality of a given church from year to year.

But the disadvantage is obvious: What is good for one might not be good for another. Pentecostal churches will measure what percentage of their members have been baptized in the Holy Spirit and spoken in tongues. Southern Baptists don’t agree. They measure Sunday school enrollment. Episcopalians don’t agree. They measure how many take Communion. Quakers don’t agree. They measure how many stand up for nonviolence. Seventh-day Adventists measure tithers. Lutherans drink beer and fight for doctrinal purity. Fundamentalist Baptists fight for doctrinal purity but don’t drink beer. Presbyterians believe sanctification is a never-ending process, while Nazarenes believe it can be sudden and total.

A third method of gauging church quality has been attempted by social scientists. Their research has been reported in technical journals and books through the years. However, they have not really studied churches; they have evaluated individual Christians to determine the nature of their religion, how it develops, and the impact it has on their lives. These approaches include scales of religiosity or spirituality developed by Faulkner and DeJong, Gluck and Stark, Himmelfarb, Jones, King and Hunt, Lenski, Thurston and Chave, and others.

In a recent variation of this approach, the Gallup Poll has measured the proportion of American adults who are receiving religious education, who are in Bible study groups, who share their faith with others, and who have interest in religious retreats. A scale of spiritual commitment has been developed to test individual belief in the divinity of Jesus Christ, the relative importance of religious beliefs in determining life priorities, prayer, belief that God loves us no matter what, comfort and support from religious beliefs, attitude toward persons of other races and religions, and the desire to be more religious.

All this is important. But it doesn’t come to grips with the quality of a congregation. A church is a social unit; the whole is more than the sum of its parts. In evaluating the quality of a church, it is the end result-how individuals work together to accomplish God’s goals for the body-that matters most.

We are not interested in promoting a new kind of carnal competition between churches. We have no desire to create charts of who is more spiritual than whom. We take seriously Paul’s objection to “those who measure themselves by themselves and compare themselves with themselves” (2 Cor. 10:12). But only three chapters later, the same apostle writes, “Examine yourselves to see whether you are in the faith; test yourselves. Do you not realize that Christ Jesus is in you- unless, of course, you fail the test?” (2 Cor. 13:5).

We agree with George Gallup, who says, “What is needed is a whole new set of measurements in addition to those we now have, which measure primarily religious involvement or participation. We need to probe beneath external religiosity to the bedrock of spiritual commitment.” And we would add that these measurements need to be taken on congregations as well as on individual Christians.

The Components of Quality

Our objective, then, is to produce a manual measuring scale (no computer needed) for church quality that will work interdenominationally and internationally. What form it will take is not yet clear. We are currently no more than half way home. We have dissected quality into thirteen constituent parts. We have yet to determine the best ways to measure those parts.

The first phase of the project was simply to propose categories. We administered open-ended questionnaires to 134 pastors enrolled in a doctor of ministry program. This sample had a representative denominational spread and also included forty Asians, mostly Koreans. The responses formed a definite pattern, giving us the following list of desirable phenomena to work with:

Attitude toward religion. Church members regard their involvement in the church primarily as a service to God rather than a means to fulfill personal needs.

Bible knowledge. Church members are increasing in their grasp of the teachings of the Bible. They can integrate this with a theological system that enables them to apply the Bible’s teachings to their life situations.

Distinctive lifestyle. Members generally manifest their faith in Christ by living a lifestyle clearly and noticeably distinct from that of non-Christians in the same community.

Fellowship. Members are growing in their personal relationships with each other through regular participation in church fellowship groups of one kind or another.

Giving. Members give an appropriate portion of their income to the local church and/or to other Christian causes.

Lay ministry. The lay people of the church are engaged in such ministries as teaching and discipling. In some cases this happens through consciously discovering, developing, and using their spiritual gifts.

Membership growth. New people are joining the church and being assimilated into its life so that there is an annual net membership increase.

Missions. The church actively supports missions, organizing and sustaining a strong program for recruiting, sending, and financing home and foreign missionaries.

Personal devotions. Members spend time daily in prayer, Bible reading, meditation, and other personal spiritual exercises.

Social justice. Either through the congregation as a whole or through specialized Christian agencies, members are striving to make changes in sociopolitical structures that will contribute to a more moral and just society.

Social service. Members are serving others outside the congregation. This includes direct personal involvement with the poor and needy, or in programs designed to help the needy.

Witnessing. Members regularly attempt to share their faith in Jesus Christ with unbelievers.

Worship. Members regularly participate in the worship services scheduled by the church.

LEADERSHIP at this point agreed to join the project and to survey its readers. This would provide direct input on what local-church leaders considered important in assessing quality. A questionnaire was developed and mailed to a scientifically selected sample of subscribers, and 248 usable questionnaires were returned.

The eight denominational families that produced the most responses were independent or nondenominational churches, Presbyterian/Reformed churches, Pentecostals/charismatics, Lutherans, Churches of Christ/Christian churches, United Methodists, Southern Baptists, and American Baptists. A smaller number responded from several other denominational families. Clergy comprised 85 percent of the respondents. They were 90 percent male and 88 percent Anglo-American. Theologically, more than 90 percent perceived themselves to be evangelical or fundamentalist. So what we are looking at is mostly the opinion of male, AngloAmerican, evangelical clergy, but from a wide spectrum of denominations.

These pastors’ churches are fairly well spread over the ranges of size, growth rates, urbansuburban-rural, and church age, although 72 percent of the churches were more than twenty years old.

A few of the participants questioned the validity of the whole project. “I fear this is an attempt to measure scientifically a phenomenon which cannot be and perhaps should not be measured scientifically,” wrote one. But by and large, they were supportive Sand even enthusiastic about the effort.

Ranking the Components

How did they value the various qualities of a church that presumably can be measured? The accompanying graph shows the relative weights given to each item.

The first thing that needs to be said is that none of the thirteen was considered to be unimportant. Even the lowest ratings fell between “important” and “very important” on the scale. Their significance, therefore, is the way they are compared to one another. They form a sort of priority list for ministry. Although social service and social justice come out toward the bottom of the list, for example, they are nevertheless important parts of a high-quality church. But they should not be carried out to the detriment of Bible teaching, personal devotions, or worship.

Actually, a choice should never have to be made. All thirteen ministries should be prominent in the activities of every church. If the church is neglecting any one of them, this will pull down the overall quality.

Perhaps one item, we have since realized, does not belong on the list: membership growth. Its low ranking, next to the bottom, was undoubtedly due to the perception that it indicates quantity rather than quality.

Differences in the responses of those who identified themselves as liberals indicate that the lineup might read differently if a higher percentage of liberals had responded. They tended to give higher ratings to social service and social justice and lower ratings to personal devotions, missions, Bible knowledge, and especially witnessing. Both independents and Southern Baptists, for example, rated witnessing at 8.2 on the scale of 0-9, while United Methodists and Presbyterians put it at 6.0.

The Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination founded through the missionary vision of A. B. Simpson, ranked missions at 8.1, compared to the Presbyterians, who gave it 6.1. One interesting result, which may or may not be statistically significant, is that American Baptists ranked missions slightly higher than Southern Baptists in this survey.

FIGURE GOES HERE

Nevertheless, all are agreed that fulfilling the Great Commission is a mark of high church quality.

Another component is the development of multiple fellowship groups in the church, which our respondents ranked eighth. This proved to be the one area that correlated significantly with church growth rates. Declining churches gave a 5.8 rating to fellowship, while growing churches put it around 7.2.

As this project progresses, we will be able to see if there is some correlation between church quality and church growth. Are growing churches generally of a higher quality than plateaued or declining churches? We suspect they are but have no way of knowing for sure. For example, consider the fellowship factor. Growing churches put a higher priority on this than nongrowing churches. But which is the cause and which the effect? Does growth create fellowship, or does fellowship create growth?

On the other hand, is it possible to have a high-quality church that is not growing? A church located next to a college campus or a military base, where there is high population mobility, is growing if it just stays even. The same holds true for certain urban, especially inner-city, situations, where a church that has shown little numerical increase over ten years might in fact, rate high in quality. Or to take another example, a church in a disintegrating rural community has extremely low growth potential, yet can be a very high-quality church.

Still to Come: Measuring the Components

This survey has made a start, but much more research and testing needs to be done before a suitable measuring instrument is available for your church. LEADERSHIP will report developments and introduce the instrument when it is ready. It is hoped that LEADERSHIP readers will continue to play a key role in this. Comments and suggestions are invited.

Since, as we have mentioned, the present survey is biased toward Anglo-American evangelicals, input is needed from Christian leaders representing other nations and cultures. One Central American who saw the preliminary results speculated that social justice would rank higher there than in the United States. Whether this is true remains to be seen, but it needs to be tested. Other work will be needed by Africans, Asians, Middle Easterners, Europeans, and others.

It is our hope that Christian leaders will soon be able to study the quality of their churches more accurately than ever before. They can then know where efforts need to be concentrated to improve. Thus they can become more effective agents for extending the kingdom of God.