Kairos Church Planting Support

The Traditional Church as Family, Neighborhood, Magnet, Resource and Concept Churches

On a recent trip to Dallas, Texas I met a number of you who are receiving this church planting workshop bulletin. I gathered from comments that the "daily" (it really has been just weekly) updates have made an impact. I have been out of town for the past 2 weekends, so you got a bit of a break, but it's time to get back into the saddle.

In the last bulletin we began looking at structures of churches, reviewing the concept of house churches and cell churches. In this week's bulletin we're going to look at traditional churches and their structures.

Most of us (very probably all of us) grew up in what is termed a traditional church. Our churches were often times from 50-200 members in size. We met twice on Sundays and probably had a mid-week service or Bible classes as well. We knew who the church members were because we saw them at services Sunday mornings. We also knew who the really committed members were because they attended all the other services and all the other activities as well. That, in fact, was the chief criterion by which the spirituality of church members was evaluated, by their attendance at church functions. What we were less aware of is that these ideas were the result of both size and value assumptions. We assumed that our experience was normative.

Today, the traditional church is more varied in size, structure and organization than it was in the past. What distinguishes the traditional church from the other types of churches is that it still retains congregational worship services as a defining criterion (as compared to the small group basis of the house and cell churches). The following chart identifies 5 types of traditional church structures, and compares them by 7 key identifiers: size, structure, staff, levels of ministry, assimilation, metaphor and key activities. There is not the space here to go into detail on each cell in the chart, but let's look at the 5 types of traditional churches through their 7 key identifiers.

Chart of Traditional Church Structures
(This is a MWord table)

The Family Church

The family church is the smallest traditional church, typically with less than 50 members. It is has a single cell (the primary worship/meeting). There is usually a patriarch who leads the church. Ministry is direct (preaching, singing, praying, visiting, etc.). New members are assimilated through an adoption process by which they become recognized members of the family. The primary metaphor is the nuclear family, where everyone knows everyone else and shares in the "common meal" (i.e. the Sunday AM worship time). The key activity of the family church is keeping the legacy alive.

The Neighborhood Church

This is comfortable ground for most of us; this is our church. The neighborhood church is usually larger than a family church because it is typically composed of a nucleus of several core families. It still is a single-cell church, using the Sunday worship periods to identify its members, but it has other programs as well: Bible classes, seniors groups, and teen programs are common. Neighborhood churches are large enough to pay a full-time minister, and they may also have one, sometimes two, other paid ministry staff. The type of ministry required of the staff is still direct ministry, which will include: preaching sermons, teaching Bible classes and printing church bulletins. New members are assimilated through a conformity process so that they learn how to act and what is expected of them. The primary metaphor is that of the nuclear family; we value knowing everyone. Trust building as the key activity means that new members are expected to conform to the informal and unwritten (but well known) code of conduct expected of a member.
 
The Magnet Church

What separates the neighborhood church from the magnet church? Primarily it is the shift from a single cell to a multiple cell church. The magnet church is too large to sustain face-to-face contact among all its members at any single event. Since we as people find our identity and belonging within communities, the magnet church must have multiple communities in which its members find their identity. The main means for having multiple identity cells is by offering multiple worship services. For people used to neighborhood churches this is often a threatening change, because we can no longer know everybody else. Thus the metaphor of the church has to expand from that of the nuclear family to an extended family, a family that knows they belong to each other, but only see each other occasionally. The assimilation task of the magnet church is to form new members into its identity communities. These communities are often of 3 types: large communities based on multiple worship services, mid-size communities such as Bible classes and small communities of home and ministry groups. Staff ministers are required to make training a major part of their ministry if the various programs of the church are to function well under the guidance of qualified ministry heads. The magnet church requires a high quality of teamwork and coordination among the various identity communities in order to successfully retain its members.

The Resource Church

The resource church is a fairly recent arrival on the church scene. Where the magnet church exerts influence in a small, regional area or city, the resource church exerts influence over areas as large as a state or even an entire country. Resource churches exhibit complex layers of communities, ministries, and services. Resource churches will often have full-time specialists who run ministries such as food and benevolence relief, counseling services, and dependency programs. The multiple thousands of members in the resource church requires its ministers to be able to think strategically in terms of both the church's internal structures and its external ministries. Thus creating and communicating a vision for the church and organizing its members to meet that vision become key activities.

The Concept Church

Only a few resource churches make the move into a concept church. What makes a church a concept church is that it has identified and promotes the one BIG idea. Some of the most well known concept churches are those such as Saddleback and Rick Warren's purpose driven church idea, Willowcreek and Bill Hybel's seeker sensitive church and Paul Yonggi Cho's Full Gospel Church in Seoul, Korea and the cell group concept. These churches typically spawn an industry around their BIG idea that impacts churches across a wide denominational spectrum, and often worldwide.

For the sake of the kingdom,
Stanley Granberg