I have seen many changes over the years but I believe that the Assemblies is becoming the church of the “I remember when”. I have taught and spoken at many churches and anymore when I ask the question is the Spirit moving the answer is “I remember when”, the Spirit use to move, I remember when people were healed at the alter. Over the last few years instead of giving the people the answer of the Holy Spirit and the being filled with the Spirit we are even afraid to mention it due to the fact that we might scare them off.

When I see Assembly churches teaching the Apostles Creed to our young girls instead of “We Believe” and when the Missionette leaders are told not to follow the example of praying with the girls to receive the Holy Spirit because praying for them to receive the Holy Spirit should not be done in the Church.

My heart cries to see the Holy Spirit leave our denomination but no one will listen. So I am on my knees praying that we wake up and get back to living the 16 Fundamental Truths under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Hey, I only got to skim the above article, which strides along with focus, but then offers honestly posted speculation. Thanks for being honest about that…

Thank you for pointing to an emphasis in discipleship. I agree whole-heartedly with evangelism, but newborn infants need milk fairly quickly after birth, or life ceases. There are already enough adult children in the United States of America as it is…

TO THE KING!

In Christ,
Bryan

I agree with most of what you write, you are straightforward and honest, but not insulting.

I have been an AOG pastor’s wife for approximately 30 years. My husband has been in various positions of ministry, (youth, Assoc., Senior).

From what I have observed, those statistics are many times what the pastor hopes will happen the next year, not what actually is. I don’t believe they intentionally lie, but there is much more attention and respect paid to the pastors of larger churches….I liken it to the business world- money and people.

I have become pretty disappointed over the years at the way leadership in many of our churches do not follow Jesus’ command to “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul and strength; and love your neighbor as yourself.”

Without getting specific, I have found that if you disagree with certain people, and especially if they perceive that they have “position” because a relative is a superintendent, or they have a friend at headquarters, these “ministers of the gospel” can become pushy, abusive, screaming maniacs. Also, some pastors and their wives seem to be some of the worst gossips I have ever seen.

In other words, not much “Fruit of the Spirit” going on. How do we expect God to bless when we act like this?

Instead of all the programs, why don’t we have more accountability, zeal to see the kingdom of God grow, not “my kingdom”. I know it seems basic, but a mutual respect for everyone, (not just those with huge churches or with connections). It seems to me , that’s how Jesus ministered.

What is very disturbing to me, is that people say to you , Rich, that you can say the things you do because you are not an Assemblies pastor, like we are in the Mafia. Are we ruled by fear of man?

Let me clarify: There are wonderful pastors, wives, superintendents, etc. in the Assemblies.

It just seems that as a whole, we are becoming much more like the world that we used to preach against and heading in a direction that we want God to bless, not following after God’s heart.

God help us!

Lucy

We found your post both provocative and helpful in our own conversations on these issues.

Having said that, I want to respond to your concern about the “failure” of evangelism among the AOG.

As I read your numbers, evangelism seems to be working just fine among the AOG, if by “evangelism” we mean leading people to make decisions for Christ. In 1997, admittedly a peak year, the AOG reported a new conversion for every 4 existing adherents. That’s amazing! Your data indicate that the AOG have recorded double digit new conversion rates for every one of the last 25 years ranging from 14% to 25% per year! If true and reliable, those numbers are incredible. Yet you conclude that “the A/G’s evangelism efforts have failed” and “we are in seriously bad shape as an evangelistic enterprise.”

The AOG is growing at a steady rate of about 3% per year. Yes, churches are closing and net gains in terms of number of churches are down, but the overall denomination has more than doubled in the past 25 years! Many denominations would be delighted to realistically project adding 3 million adherents in the next 25 years based on recent trends. Members of AOG churches clearly DO believe in evangelism and excel at doing it despite your lament to the contrary.

The real problem these data highlight is one of “disciple-making” or “assimilation,” which you also note. That is, most of the people who are noted as making commitments for Christ are not becoming members or adherents of AOG churches. It looks like about 27% of new conversions DO become adherents, while the remainder (73%) do not. But we’d have to have similar data from other denominations to know whether this is better than average, about average, or worse than average. In the absence of a meaningful context it’s hard to know. My guess is the Southern Baptist Convention would be a good comparison group b/c of their emphasis on evangelism.

If the AOG had retained everyone one of their new converts over the past 25 years (i.e., seen them become adherents), I estimate they’d have 10.3 million adherents by now rather than 2.8 million. The data presented here do not support inferences about what happened to the missing 7.5 million. We can posit many different theories, but they’re all just speculation that would require other data to substantiate. But it would certainly be worth finding out what happens to the “missing” 7.5 million.

Some theories that occur to me about the “missing” 7.5 million:

a. They go to other churches (AOG is building the larger kingdom (POS)). What a gift this is to the larger kingdom of God and to other denominations that are less effective at evangelism!

b. Some of them are phantom conversions (Churches pad their numbers to look good on the denomination’s highest priority (NEG)). This is a fact of life among groups that emphasize evangelism to the exclusion of disciple-making.

c. The conversions don’t “stick” (New converts do not become disciples and “fall away” (NEG)). Another fact of life among groups that emphasize evangelism to the exclusion of disciple-making.

d. Some conversions are repeat conversions. (The same person “converts” several times as they grow in understanding (POS? NEG?)). To the extent that this is true, it may indicate a crude form of disciple-making.

My question for you: Is it necessary that every AOG convert become an AOG adherent for you to celebrate the AOG’s evangelistic work? (I hope not!)
If not, what % of them would have to become adherents for you to celebrate AOG’s evangelistic work?

It may be true that the AOG should increase its emphasis on genuine spiritual transformation rather than emphasizing conversion decisions, but GST is much harder to measure and count up across all its churches.

Blessings to you as you stimulate clearer and better thinking and strategizing in the church!

Karl L.

« Awesome analysis in my view, and highlights my concerns that the first word of the biblical salvation message has been lost. Jesus preached, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” The Apostles preached, “Repent! …” Even in “counseling” the woman caught in adultery Jesus said, “go and sin no more.” What I want to know is, where is the REPENT today? Have we so lost trust in the ability of the truth to set people free that we have abandoned it and now depend on psychological and sociological marketing techniques instead? … » [more]

“I hit a new pastor’s blog called ‘BlogRodent’. It is very thought provoking. The Blog has a lot about leadership in the church and the Assemblies of God. What caught my attention was the part about “mentoring”. I have always loved those that have “mentored” me in the things of God and in ministry. But the Lord is showing me that I need to mentor. I know I am doing that,and do that weekly with some guys, But through several opportunities to mentor others, I believe the Lord is asking me to allow that to take a different “shape” then it has in the past. Any way, I am praying about that and will move as I feel led when I return.…”

Ironically, I believe the present problem with church growth can be traced back to the “Church Growth Movement” (a la Fuller Seminary, Peter Wagner, et. al.) which now for some 30 years has defined how we talk about and implement ministry. We now accept and use terms like “transfer growth” and “homogeneous principle” hardly without questioning their biblical roots.

To be sure, over that time there have been many who have raised concerns about the Church Growth approach, but CGM largely has become the standard. I believe one of the reasons the CGM (now in numerous incarnations) has been so enthusiastically embraced by church leaders is that it provided a means to quantify ministry. It gave us a technical vocabulary, it provided ways to statistically analyze cause and effect in church health and growth, it utilized tangible measures of success, etc.

While each of these things may not be bad in and of themselves, they oftentimes have and still can serve a sinister function. What I mean is that the Kingdom of God is “not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace and joy in the Holy Ghost.” In other words, authentic Kingdom work deals primarily with intangibles, not statistically measurable quantities.

I realize church bureaucracies don’t want to hear this because they live and breathe statistical data. But bean-counting never builds the true Church. My experience is that a majority of church leaders have not been able to resist the temptation to bite into the forbidden fruit of the promise of “success” offered by CGM philosophy. In just enough cases, the promise has seemed to come to fulfillment. The “mega-church” appeared and confirmed the “wisdom” of the Fuller gurus. Churches that called pastors with a certain personality profile and skill-set, built non-churchy facilities and allowed them to never grow beyond 80% capacity (a tenet of CGM), made sure they had ample parking, effectively marketed to their homogeneous niche, and etc., in some cases began to experience unprecedented growth.

The fact is, the mega-church was always the exception. The overwhelming majority of churches are 100 and under — and probably always will be. But the bait had been effectively set on the hook. Now every pastor of a church of 25 or 50 or 100 began the quest to become the next megachurch — driven more by a fear of being perceived as inferior, incompetent and irrelevant than by a love for Christ and a burden for lost souls.

And like all false gods, the idol of Church Growth deceived us. The reason I say the CGM has oftentimes served a sinister (i.e. satanic) function is that is has the marks of the subtleties of the Serpent all over it. It is made to appear to be so good, and yet it is actually destructive. It appeals to the carnal impulses in ministers — the drive for success and a feeling of accomplishment and peer-recognition.

These are not insignificant things. They should never be allowed a place in the heart of a minister. By all accounts at the time, the Son of God himself died an utter failure. But what appeared to be failure, three days later was confirmed as the greatest success ever achieved. When measured by God’s standard, what appears successful is not necessarily so — and what statistically is counted a failure can actually be a great success in spiritual terms. Thus it has pleased God to choose the things the world (and the carnal church) considers foolish and weak to shame the wise and the strong (1 Corinthians 1).

My final thought: Church growth is the wrong goal. What the last 30 years has proven, and the statistics now bear out, is that a church can grow without the Kingdom growing. The mega-church movement and most church growth of the last 30 years in the U.S. has been “transfer growth”. By and large it is a growth attributable to migration, not to salvation.

How could this have happened? Why only now are denominational leaders facing this fact? Because we bowed down to the idol of church growth and were not really concerned with Kingdom growth. The Kingdom only grows when basically two things take place:

1.) a previously unregnerate soul comes to salvation

2.) the saved grow in holiness (sanctification).

Church Growth philosophy has failed us on both of these points. The net result of CGM ideology has been diminished real evangelistic effectiveness (despite its promise to the contrary) and rampant carnality in our churches. The marketing approach produces carnal churches — and in some cases over-sized carnal churches. But after all, if church growth is the goal, any growth is good growth — carnal or not.

We need to change our goal from church growth to Kingdom growth. Kingdom growth takes into account not only (or not even primarily) quantity growth, but also quality growth (holiness, true spirituality). Jesus is not coming back to receive a big church necessarily, but a holy church.

My advice to our denominational leaders and local church leaders would be to stop obsessing over statistical growth or non-growth. To everything there is a season. Perhaps this is the season we should be focusing on the spiritual quality of our churches, not their size. There IS such a thing as unhealthy growth. Just like cancer in the body, some church growth can be pathological.

The real present crisis in the church is a crisis of holiness. A holy church is a healthy church.

I’m still waiting to hear this come as the urgent cry of our leaders rather then lamenting plateauing or declining numerical growth.

1. Traditional Assembly of God, ministry style, needs to be evaluated.

2. The church can be relevant without compromising revelation, the gifts, or pentecostal priorities.

3. I personally needed more education in the Word (graduated in May with a Master’s in Theology)

4. The church gatherings have to be a place of love, acceptance, and encouragement.

5. I personally needed renewal.

Things five things have all been addressed by myself, and staff. We have grown by over 50% since then!