Podcast Episode #390
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Every year, we take a look a the trends we expect to see in the new year. Today, we look at the trends for 2018.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
- People are listening to more audio for learning purposes than ever before.
- The boomer retirement crisis is two-fold: a lot are about to retire, but some will hang on too long.
- The retail bust could be big for churches looking for space. More commercial space than ever before is coming available.
- Every church should be a church for its neighborhood.
- If you are not learning, you are not leading.
- Too many churches overbuilt their worship space in the past.
The ten 2018 trends we cover are:
- The audio revolution.
- Boomer retirement crisis.
- The deferred maintenance crisis in church facilities.
- Churches moving into retail spaces.
- Ongoing church closures.
- The rise of the neighborhood church.
- The learning revolution of the best church leaders.
- Downsizing of worship centers/sanctuaries.
- The rise of networks.
- More Great Commission intentionality.
Episode Sponsors
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Feedback
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2017/12/19/white-christianity-is-in-big-trouble-and-its-its-own-biggest-threat/?hpid=hp_regional-hp-cards_rhp-posteverything%3Ahomepage%2Fcard&utm_term=.a5fd40917851
This is another one that will have to be faced in ’18.
Look forward to this list each year! Thanks, Thom
Your list is a good reminder of why every Body of Christ should engage in a self evaluation/self study process on a predetermined schedule. Things do change. If we did a generational analysis within a local church, what would it show? We need to be prepared to respond to change.
Overbuilding in the 1980s was just one of several periods when US churches built larger worship centers/sanctuaries than they needed. In a lecture he delivered in Boston in 1918, Percy Dearmer, a the time a visiting professor at the Berkeley Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut, talks about several churches that he had visited, in which small congregations were meeting worship centers/sanctuaries far larger than they needed. He describes one worship center/sanctuary that was crammed to the corners with pews but which swallowed up the church’s congregation of 35 odd people. He relates how this church never had a congregation larger than 100 people in its heyday. The “if you build it, they will come” approach, sometimes described as “architectural evangelism,” has a long-history in the United States. The churches Dearmer visited had been built in the nineteenth century. At the time Dearmer visited these churches, church attendance was declining both in the United Kingdom and the United States. He notes that since the war (World War I) people no longer felt the social pressure to attend church that they once did. A highly individualist view of religion was making inroads in both countries- a view of religion that did not value church attendance. He further notes in his lecture that while fewer people were going to church in the United Kingdom and the United States, the gospel was advancing around the world. Omit the references to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his lecture and he sounds like he is talking about churches today.
For their part many churches appear not to have learned from the mistakes of the past.