Fewer newcomers in church – meaning people who have not been in church before or not for five years – makes predicting a decline church attendance a virtual certainty. Taking the Sydney Anglican diocese (region) as a case study, a decline in newcomers from 12 per cent in 2001 to 9.3 per cent in 2011 to 5.4 per cent in 2021 has been accompanied by a decline in overall attendance. Figures reported at the 2023 Synod (church parliament) – showed the last two years of Covid have seen a plunge of 18.5 per cent from the peak.
A failure to recover attendance to pre-Covid levels appears to be the case for most church networks in Australia.
Authors of two significant recent books provide contrasting recipes of how to build up evangelism and newcomer numbers.
David Rietveld, the senior minister from Dapto Anglican’s 2023 book Being Christian after Christendom describes how the society has changed, requiring change in how we deliver the message.
In the forthcoming book Growth and Change Andrew Heard of EV church on the NSW central Coast calls for greater passion and effort for church growth.
Rietveld’s response to a ‘post-Christian world view’
The ground has shifted, Rietveld declares. “While overall church attendance declines and some christian values are publicly eroding, we shall see the Christian legacy casts an enormous shadow . Some but not all parts of christianity are in decline… Church attendance rates have fluctuated over history. We are experiencing not the end of christianity in the West, but the end of the West as a Christian culture.”
Operating from a basis that the church is a respectable part of society is no longer possible. Christians are seen as power-hungry. Rietveld acknowledges this is not a fair picture of many who follow the one who came not to be served but to serve. But he sees little utility in Christians being loud and oppositional in the new society, in effect asserting influence we no longer have. Instead we need to operate as a minority, demonstrating who we are by how we live.
“What I’m contending is that actually the Christian worldview has gone, and it’s not our job to actually Christianize society,” Rietveld told Dominic Steele on the Pastor’s Heart podcast. “That was a good thing to do, I think during Christendom, but to somehow think that it’s our task to stop people lying or to reinforce Christian values like anti-abortion, important stuff for us, and we can have a voice in public debates, but we now actually have to kind of go, all right, if society wants to go that way, let it go and we’re going to position ourselves slightly different. So rather than thinking defensively, defending every bridge, rather what are the bridges that we can most likely take? Where are the places where we’re most likely to be effective, evangelistically? I think that’s a more appropriate way to think.”
In his book Rieveld gives an example of how he commended marriage to his mates, taking advantage of the existence of a faithful Christians minority. “I was at the bar after soccer practice, sharing a beer with my non-Christian teammates the other day. the conversation topics can be narrow and base.There is usually someone in my team in some kind of relationship breakdown, seeking another partner. Relationships are about sexual liaisons. This night, the details of an elderly couple (both almost 90 years old) who still walked down the road everyday hand-in-hand came up. Intuitively, all admired if not envied the deep companionship of this relationship;ationship. the length, depth, and exclusivity of this elderly couples’ relationship was of a different order than the aspirations and experiences of my non-Christian friends. I was able to tell them this couple came to my local church.”
Andrew Heard and the passion for church Growth.
Reflecting on the brutal stats, Andrew Heard, pointed out on the Pastor’s Heart that not all Sydney Anglican churches will be experiencing the same stats. Some churches will be getting newcomers.
“There are some churches that are performing very differently in the same culture, in the same soil, he tells the Pastor’s Heart. “Before coming to this, just a quick anecdote. There was one of the church plants that came through our Reach Australia work [that] was established in a city context. And the first few years they were seeing converts regularly each year. And the local reformed evangelical church that had been there for some decades, generations bless them, the senior minister there – the young church planter told me this – the senior minister arrived in his building one day with his elders in tow, and he sat his elders down in this new building or this renovated space and said, this church is seeing X number of converts a year. About 5% of their adult attendance were being converted a year. And he said this wonderfully. He said, ‘We are on the same street. We have got the same gospel. They’re not preaching anything different to us. It’s not the soil. There’s something that we are doing or not doing that they are.’ It’s something we are bringing to the exercise. Now identifying that that is, bless the man, that is a massively great exercise in leadership. It’s kind of confronting the brutal facts and cutting away all the potential excuses and saying, what are we bringing to the task?”
Heard describes ” a kind of hyper-Calvinism that says the Lord gives the growth where he wills one Corinthians three. And so I don’t need to look at me, I don’t need to look at the data. I just do what I do faithfully and whatever happens happens. But what I’m trying to offer here is that same people, same gospel, same church culture, seeing far better outcomes.”
Heard says the Christian’s hearts are not into evangelism. Newer models of church in many cases are demonstrating more passion for evangelism that older ones. He does not point to the rapid growth of the Fellowship of Independent Evangelical Churches network, compared to the decline of the Sydney Anglican Diocese but it clearly lurks in the background.
The Newcomer stat, Heard tells Steele, is not the biggest stat to worry about “The far more important stat is that in the Sydney region, was it almost 5 million people? You add up church attendance of all Protestant denominations in Sydney, best guess it’s about 200,000. Sydney’s about 50 to 60,000, let’s say. What percentage of that is, is it 3%?
“It’s minuscule. And until our churches feel the weight of that, they won’t care about the problem of the newcomer issue until we are genuinely captivated, captured by the sense that our city’s going to Hell. 97% of people are lost without hope, without God. Until that grips our hearts, we won’t look at the data, pay attention to what needs to happen to change it, own the fact that we bring things to this until we are captive. So it’s a hard issue as much as it’s a head issue, as much as it’s a skill issue.”
Heard’s warning of danger
In Growth and Change, on sale next month Heard also pushes back against some leaders’ desire for church growth. “The most dangerous people are the leaders and evangelists who not only long to see growth, but who also sympathise deeply with the needs and concerns of the people we are seeking to reach. I’m talking about leaders who feel most keenly the needs of the unconverted sinner and the pain and difficulties that unconverted sinners experience because of the way we do things in our churches.
“This is the most dangerous type of leader, for this is the leader who does everything with the wrong audience as his or her primary concern. Their dominant question is, ‘How will the world react to this thought, this teaching, or this action?’
“It ought to be obvious why this is so dangerous: it leads to a ministry that ‘self-censors’. The leader who is most concerned about how an unconverted person receives what is said or done will see almost every issue through the lens of what will make it hard or easy for that person to connect with church. And because they long to see these people won to Christ and connected with his people, they will be hypersensitive to anything that might potentially make it hard for them to connect.”
On this surface this warning might seem to make the Heard approach and Rietveld incompatible. But these messages should be read together. A closer look at Rietveld helps. (The Other Cheek hopes to return to Heard when the book hits the market next month,)
Both sides now
Logically, Heard’s call for the changes we need to make to produce growth and Rieveld’s description of a different social environment, can sit together. But that is not a call for more of the evangelism we have been used to. At a presentation last year Rietveld explained out failure to communicate using old models
| WHAT IS SAID | WHAT THE WORLD LIKELY HEARS |
| God has a plan for you. | This is a power play. I am the expert on me. |
| Sin seperates | You are judgmental and hypocritical |
| Trust Jesus | Another power play. Jesus and Buddha are a resource |
| You can have eternal life | Agnostic about afterlife, focus on me now |
He tells a how teenagers at a low fee Christian school – just like their peers filter the Christian message through a assumption that living your life anyway one choses works if it harms nobody else.
Drawing on Chris Watkin’s work, in Biblical Critical Theory, he believes we need to show how deep yearnings of people are met in Christ.
Here’s how Rietveld describes how we have used the context of Christendom in gospel presentations.
- Your existential yearnings are framed by the Christian world View.
- I announce the relevant gospel dimension
- This is how you can have it in him.
In post-Christiandom Reitveld suggests it needs to be more like this.
- This is what you want
- This is why you can not have it, the way you are searching for it.
- this is how it is found through Christ on the cross.
- This is how you can have it in him.,
This might be a harder message to communicate for many Christians. It requires a rethink of old form alas – not of the gospel but of the way we summarise it. That need to work harder reinforces Heard’s point that real passion for evangelism is what is needed in many of our churches.
But Heard is also not arguing for repeating evangelical formulas from the past – In a significant chapter he calls for a theologically-led pragmatism. He quotes the former Dean of Sydney Phillip Jensen “Pragmatism without theology is awful. It is the awful tyranny of the church growth movement, which keeps arguing ‘this works in growing churches, therefore we should do it’. On the other hand, theology without pragmatism is a tyranny that we’re also under: traditionalism. … On the one hand, we’re being seduced into non-evangelical patterns of ministry; on the other hand, we’re being constipated.”
Rietveld’s analysis needs to pass a theological test – and discussion about Heard’s book will centre on that as well. But both will need to be worked out practically.
The Other Cheek sees another necessary component. With the Post Christian Worldview environment (Rietveld’s description of today) the worth of living as a Christian needs to be seen. It no longer is assumed.
If it ever was. Jesus said “In the same way, let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven.”
The elderly couple described by Rietveld is one example. Bridge ministries such as the annual local art exhibition held at Dominic Steele’s Village church are no longer a “nice to have” but are required. Hospitality that demonstrates inclusion and care for neighbour, and ministries like community choirs and playgroups offer the community insight into the joyful life of a confident minority. which is what we are.
A key question that maybe did not need to be asked in years gone by: if your church disappeared would the locals miss what it did for them? But with Rietveld and Heard we also wish that many more of those neighbours would be part of church too.
Correction: the line under the “both sides now” subhead has been modified to better summarise Andrew Heard’s call.
My understanding is that we don’t have ‘less’ newcomers, we have ‘fewer’ newcomers. But as for the substance of the topic, thanks for the useful overview. It’s hard work to review old methods and habits.
Correct!
Is the model flawed? A while back I read Rick Warren’s story of getting started and ending up with “Saddleback”. There seemed to be a glaring difference between the refreshing start and the development. What is being aimed for? As has been said, if I aim at nothing I am sure to hit it. A lot of resources get invested – for what? It is surely easier to take a “steady as she goes” approach than to consider radical change of direction, and change of methodology. “Gathering” has always been central, even in its original context, to the word we know as “church”. Why gather, and how? How far did/does the Synagogue provide a model? What model emerges from the pages of the New Testament? What assumptions can be reviewed and abandoned? Perhaps peripheral things have too strong a hold to be dislodged. I think the “old wineskins” do not really work. These are questions that can be addressed by specific groups in their local context.