Church

New Zealand churches of all denominations are being encouraged to take part in the five-yearly Church Life Survey during November.

The survey creates a snapshot of the whole Church. It provides details about demographics, attenders’ growth in faith, commitment to the local church vision, and the relationship of the church to its local community. It asks questions about reaching out to others, care for young people, and attitudes to leadership.

The survey aims to gather data that is easy to use and that can provide immediate feedback to church leadership. It can be used as a tool for mission planning, development of educational material and to plot new directions in ministry.

Questionnaires can be downloaded from the CLS website, www.clsnz.com, and the completed survey forms can be entered by churches directly on the website.

Each church receives a code to access its own results. Six reports will be prepared on each church and these can be downloaded from the website. Topics are demographics, attendance, perceptions of leadership, sense of belonging, personal spirituality, and catering for young people.

Christianity has undergone one of the greatest demographic and cultural shifts in its 2000 year history, the 2nd Global Christian Forum in Manado, Indonesia, was told.

In a statistical analysis of the changing demographics and practices of global Christianity, Mr. Peter Crossing of the Centre for the Study of Global Christianity, told the GCF that a century ago, 66 per cent of the world’s Christians lived in Europe, but today it accounts for only 26 per cent of the world’s Christian population.

Crossing also noted that a century ago Christianity was largely a Western phenomenon: “including strong European Roman Catholic presence in Latin America, where few church leaders were Latin Americans.” Today the new expressions of Global Christianity are coming from Africa and Asia.

He said the change was most dramatically illustrated by in the mother tongues used in worship and the number of denominations: today Mandarin Chinese is the 5th most prevalent language used to worship God – 100 years ago China hardly registered. (The top four today are Spanish, Portuguese, English and French.)

And Crossing said statistics showed there was over 1.136 billion hours of evangelism across the globe per year: “enough evangelism for every person to hear a one hour presentation of the gospel every other day all year long”, but “it was mostly directed at other Christians”!

Fuller extracts from Forum presentations can be found...

A new Church Life survey is out this November, and churches are encouraged to get involved.

Church Life surveys have been held in 1997, 2002 and 2007. The aim is to provide churches of all denominations with data to understand trends, resourcing and changing patterns in Christian worship in New Zealand. The survey focuses more on the practices of church life than on personal faith.

It is based on an anonymous, 30-question survey from church-goers which tracks their background, their attitudes to church and community and their values. The survey compares this data with that from other churches across their denomination and in the same region.

The New Zealand Church Life Survey committee has representatives of several denominations and is linked with the New Zealand Christian Network.

The information is fed back to individual congregations, denominations and researchers. Associate Professor Peter Lineham and Dr Barry McDonald at Massey University have developed the use of this material for long-term studies of church life.

"Through new electronic means, it is very easy and cheap for all churches to participate. The real question is whether they will," says Professor Lineham.

"The simple fact is that numbers of churches using this and the various other survey materials have decreased across the last 15 years. In the old days there were strong national bodies that tended to direct local churches. These days many of...

A working group of the Lausanne Committee for World Evangelization says worldwide research seems to indicate that only 3% of giving by evangelical Christians in 2010 went to the non-Christian world. Dr Sas Conradie, co-ordinator of the Resource Mobilization Working Group, says research provided by Todd Johnson in the Atlas of Global Christianity concluded that 82.4% of Christian giving in 2010 was spent on pastoral care, 12% on home mission and 5.6% on foreign mission. Christians in 2010 gave 96.8% of their giving to ministry in the Christian majority world, 2.9% to ministry in the evangelised non-Christian world and 0.3% of their income to ministry to unevangelised non-Christians. Thirty-five billion dollars of Christian giving is annually embezzled - more than the total of $32 billion the global Church (all Christians included - not only evangelical Christians) spends on foreign mission. Dr Conradie says there are tremendous opportunities for Christian generosity and stewardship, but he identified 11 challenges that discourage Christian giving. To help turn this around, the working group is developing a global strategy to encourage increased generosity and improved stewardship. It believes the outcomes could facilitate increased giving by evangelical Christians to Christian causes from the present $80 billion a year to $120 billion, or 3% of their income a year by 2016, with giving focused on global mission. That means an increase of $40 billion a year more for Christian...

Since 1996, the Church Life Survey group has been working to bring out a survey of church attendees at the same time as the five-yearly New Zealand census. The process has worked in the Australia and with a wider international group. In 2001, the data collected was inadequately processed, as CLS was using a computer programme that was not suitable for the purpose. Five years on, the process is now robust and stable and can be customised for individual congregation needs. CLS is holding an afternoon seminar on Wednesday, 22 September, to demonstrate the new process and possibilities of the web-based survey, and how to use the data to help pastoral planning. The seminar is from 1-4 pm, Staff lounge, Study Centre, Gate One, Massey University, SH17, Albany. Enquiries, phone (09) 414 0800 extn 41039. Website, http://clsnz.com

4: Christians behaving badly

By Murray Robertson, Leadership Development Network

Of all the possible reasons why churches stop growing this is the saddest one to write about. Even more sadly, it could perhaps be the most common. In travelling around the country, I constantly hear stories about churches that were doing really well, when sadly something went wrong, the church split, the pastor left, attendance nose-dived and the community looked on in scorn at yet one more example of Christians behaving badly. It would be very easy to lose sight of the fact that on his final night Jesus prayed for unity among his followers, not as an end in itself, but so that the world might believe.

Why does it happen? It's easy enough to say it's a manifestation of sin, which it obviously is. Or that the Devil is having a go at us, which is equally true. But why do we give sin such a place among us? I suppose at one level we should not be surprised. Reading the Gospels is a sobering lesson on how badly religious people are capable of behaving. After all, Jesus' greatest opposition did not come from hard-bitten sinners. It came from the devoutly religious who were utterly sure they were right and Jesus was wrong. But we are followers of Jesus. Presumably we have faced the issue that Jesus is right, that's why we profess to follow him. But in fact many of us do not. The behaviour that is seen in some churches is a pretty clear indication that we are not following...

3. Missing the tide By Murray Robertson, Leadership Development Network
Since the Second World War there have been three periods when evangelical churches in New Zealand have experienced times of rapid growth. The first was in the 1950s, when all denominations experienced their last time of overall growth. It culminated in the hugely effective visit by Billy Graham in 1959. No one could have anticipated at that time that the 60s would turn out to be a very difficult decade for most churches.
The tide began to turn again in the 1970s with the Jesus movement that morphed into the charismatic renewal, which witnessed a time of rapid growth in many churches and the emergence of a number of newer denominations. One interesting thing was that many of the churches that had experienced encouraging growth in the 50s looked with some suspicion on some of the new phenomena that were occurring in the 70s. It was certainly different to what had happened in the 1950s.
By the mid 1980s, the renewal movement was running out of steam, as renewal movements do. Another difficult decade followed, followed by the beginnings of another upswing starting in the mid 90s. This again was different to what happened two decades previously. Not all those churches that had previously experienced healthy growth were impacted by what started happening in the 90s. The primary emphasis moved to more of a church-based evangelism emphasis, encouraged by things like the Alpha course, Willow...

Evangelical/Pentecostal churches have increased across Auckland, according to Dr Peter Lineham of Massey University.

New Zealand Christian Network (visionnetwork) plays a significant role in connecting evangelical and Pentecostal Christians, not only in Auckland but also around the country, and many church leaders at local and national level say this greater connectedness is an integral component of this growth.
Dr Peter Lineham, Associate Professor of History and Head of the School of Social and Cultural Studies at Massey University, spoke at a recent Auckland Church Leaders meeting on "Stock-taking: Where the Church is at in 2010 in Auckland." He said not all new Christians are evangelical or Pentecostal, but this grouping is now a significant one in the wider Church.
Some of the important points made from his, and others', research included: The constant rise of unbelief by Aucklanders in the past 40+ years is shown in a number of surveys. Asian and Pacific Island immigrants have swelled the numbers in many churches, especially the historic churches like Catholic, Presbyterian and Methodist, and this has further served to mask the true level of unbelief by so many Pakeha. The Catholic Church has coped reasonably well, whereas others, such as the Anglican Church, have markedly declined. Catholics have significantly benefited by their school system and huge immigrant support. Evangelical/Pentecostal churches have increased across Auckland. Not...

By Murray Robertson, Leadership Development Network 2. Controlling leadership A second common reason why otherwise healthy churches stop growing is a misunderstanding of the very nature of leadership. Far too many of us when we are in positions of leadership understand this to mean "I am in control" rather than "I can empower others". For when we look at the ministry of Jesus we see that his ministry is about empowering rather than controlling others.
We can see this happening at every level of the life of most churches. At the denominational level, leaders so often see than their role is to ensure that the congregations under their control remain faithful to patterns of doing church that have been decreed by others often centuries before. Any really growing church will have a high level of entrepreneurial characteristics which will mark it out as different to other congregations in the particular denomination, but sadly all too often these things cannot be accepted by those in charge, regardless of how effective they are, in the interests of denominational conformity.
For those denominations with a congregational pattern of government we can often encounter clear instances of control in the leadership exercised by the congregation. Rather than the congregational meeting entrusting leadership to the elders or governing body they keep power to themselves. Empowerment happens when both responsibility and authority is delegated to others. Many hesitate to give...

By Murray Robertson, Leadership Development Network 1. The phenomena of glass ceilings Normally, healthy churches will be growing churches. But virtually every church will sooner or later encounter a strange phenomenon. The church may have been experiencing very encouraging growth over many years, but one year for no apparent reason the church will stop growing. I've called it a glass ceiling because no one can see any apparent reason why this is occurring. If the issue is not addressed in some way after a couple of year's frustrations can begin to emerge. People become nostalgic for the good old days when many people were coming to faith and the church was growing. The situation can often turn septic and people can become very judgmental in their attitudes and before long we have one more dysfunctional church. The scenario can be seen all over the country. Denomination makes no difference in this case. What is happening is actually a very natural and very explicable thing. As a rule of thumb every time a church doubles in size it basically has to reinvent itself. But this is a very difficult thing to do and it is far easier to do things as they have been done in the past. The difficulty is that for every change that is made most people in the church will perceive it as loss. For example the thing that smaller churches highly prize is the intimate relationships possible in a small congregation, but as a church continues growing it is mission that replaces relationship as...