Church Growth

Monte Sahlin has a post about the correlation between a congregation's willingness to change and church growth. He talks about two specific examples, use of internet technology and also electric guitars in worship.

The last few weeks my wife have been attending the local Spanish church, which is a perfect example of willingness to change. It is a very large church with a lot happening. They had a praise and worship style service, which my wife and I had never seen in a Spanish church before. Most Spanish churches are much more conservative than their English counter parts. The first thing we noticed was that there are a ton of children in the church. However more surprising was the number of people in the 18 to 40 age bracket. In comparison, my in-law's church has a very bi-modal distribution with quite a few children and lots of old people but not much in between.

The local church has also realized that the younger generation may not speak Spanish well, if at all. These same young people aren't usually as comfortable in the English churches. (Not as true in California, where churches tend to be ethnically mixed.) So the church has translation services as well, which is one of the reasons that we tried the church out, since I don't really speak any Spanish at all. It seems like they have some very active and innovative out-reach activities. I will keep you posted as I learn more about them.