The local congregation of believers I attend has been blessed with celebrations of baptism.  Mostly young teenaged youth along with a sprinkle (not meant as a pun) of young adults.  I am excited that the church still heralds this outward sign of an inward grace.  It should be a characteristic of any spirit-filled church.  The beauty and eagerness of these new creatures in Christ brought to mind the Biblical reference in Acts 16:5 “The churches were strengthened in faith and grew daily in number.”

As my strange and non-sequitur mind works, I started to wonder what is more important than converts to the faith.  I discovered after a couple of hours of research a phrase that has excited me, “The church is not commanded to make converts, but disciples.”  Is the goal of the church, if it is expecting long term growth, to fill the pews with converts or disciples?

One study by the LifeWay Research group compiled data on this question.  They broke their results into two groups.  Churches that have the most converts or “C” churches and churches that have the most disciples or “D” churches. This study was on churches with less than 250 attendees. 

Sorted by church priority, there were no appreciable differences between the convert oriented and disciple-oriented churches in this survey. There were some differences in the order of priority but basically very similar results.

But what stood out to me was the Disciple churches saw evangelism dollars as a higher priority than the Convert churches.  And secondly, the priority to provide for additional outside of the church activities was greater in the Convert Churches than the Disciple churches.  These two data points are remarkable in that the Churches that are making the greatest number of disciples spend more money on evangelism and less emphasis on outside activities. The third conclusion was the method of pastoral care and communications to the unchurched: In the Disciple Church pastors were seen as communicators with the unchurched and the Convert Church Pastors were seen as evangelizers.

So what am I to make of this wealth of data?  Churches that have less than 250 attendees mostly do the same stuff.  The exception is in the perception of the pastor as an evangelist for “C” churches or a good communicator for the “D” churches.

Just saying…