Seven Reasons Why Church Worship Centers Will Get Smaller
- Decreasing frequency of attendance among church members.
- The growth of the “nones.”
- The growth of the multi-site and multi-venue church.
- The Millennials’ aversion to larger worship centers.
- Governmental agencies are increasingly unfriendly to church building plans.
- The shift in emphasis from the big worship event to an emphasis on groups.
- The desire to spend more on ministry and less on facilities.
Some highlights from today’s Rainer Report:
- There has been a huge shift in attendance patterns of church goers over the past few decades.
- Millennials prefer smaller venues for corporate worship.
- Groups have become the new emphasis for churches instead of worship attendance alone.
- More and more churches are becoming debt averse leading them to not build large worship centers.
15 years after finishing construction, at a cost of $5+ million, the last congregation I served with a new-new auditorium still averages 1200 worshipers per week (total; in 2 Sunday morning services = 600 per worship hour)–in that 1800-seat auditorium (though the population of its zip code and surrounding ones has increased by thousands of new residents during these years). So far, it appears that congregation was led to overbuild by 800 – 1000 seats, at a cost of about $3500 per seat.
Me: build the worship space the congregation can afford AND has the real potential to fill–then always function toward the community in such a way that the space is filled and remains so (the alternative seems to be either to wear out the worship leaders, use satellite locations simultaneously, or plant new churches with smaller attendance). Questions along these lines appear to be ones to ask before choosing to join a church (e.g., “For how many years have the members of this church been asked to give above the tithe for the purposes of construction?”–and, “What is being done specifically to keep the new physical space filled up?”).