The Church Answers Podcast

How the Boomers Killed Many American Churches, Part 3: Rewarding Transfer Growth

While much has been written on this large generation born between 1946 and 1964, Thom argues that we have not explained why this generation hurt many congregations, some to the point of death. In these third of three episodes, he looks at how we shifted from recognizing conversion growth to transfer growth.

Duration:: 11m
Broadcast on:: 28 May 2024
Audio Format:: mp3

Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast presented by Chaney & Associates. Chaney & Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. Welcome to the Church Answers Podcast. My name is Tom Rayner. I am having a good time introducing a topic, sometimes not a fun topic to talk about, but still having a good time. It's what my generation has done to the church, baby boomers. That generation born between 1946 and 1964, that generation that brought Burger King almost shoulder to shoulder with McDonald's because Burger King says, "Hold the pickles, hold the lettuce. Special orders don't upset us. Always ask us that you let us serve it your way." While McDonald's was saying, "It's a special order. You'll have to go wait three days before we make your cheeseburger with ketchup only." Okay, I'm speaking in hyperbole. And you may not even know what I'm talking about because it's so easy to get a fast food any way you want today, but not in my day Burger King came along and said, "We're going to hit the heart of the boomers. They want to have it their way. They want to have it their way in the churches. You want to know why worship wars are taking place in churches over the last 30 to 40 years in many churches today, boomers are largely responsible for it because they wanted the music their way and they would fight for it. You want to know why you have many of the conflict within churches, many of them have it their heart, baby boomers who are trying to get things their way. We're going to talk about the baby boomers, but this time we're going to focus upon the whole issue of transfer growth. Now, here's what's going to be fun. As we talk about this issue of transfer growth, we're then going to segue into a three part series on transfer growth and that'll happen next week or the next time you see the downloads come because we do three every week. And we're going to move from boomers to the whole issue of transfer growth, but I want to introduce the transfer growth to you and just to give you an inkling of some of the things we'll be talking about in future episodes. Now, transfer growth is largely connected to boomers. Okay, we'll get into that. Well, just as a reminder, church answers podcast is brought to you by Chaney and Associates. If you happen not to listen to the three episodes where interviewed Steve Chaney, the Chaney of Chaney and Associates, the accounting firm for the church, go back a few episodes, three incredible episodes where we talk about that firm and how it's now become this dominant accounting firm for the church. But here's what I want to talk about. I want to talk about transfer growth. Tom, what is transfer growth? And why would I even think that I could be interested in it? Well, let me share what transfer growth is. When a church grows numerically, there are different ways that it can. The way that we celebrate the most is called conversion growth. Conversion growth is when a man or woman or child becomes a follower of Jesus Christ and then starts following Christ through the ministry of a local church. Conversion growth is someone accepting Christ and following up with obedience to Christ and becoming active in a church. Conversion growth used to be the only kind of growth that was talked about until the baby boomers came along. And when the baby boomers came along, well, another kind of growth to talk about. Let me talk about another growth, biological growth. Biological growth is when someone has a child, and that child is born into the church. Obviously, that baby, that new child increases the number of people in the church. They may not be put on a membership role, but they're certainly part of the attendance now. Again, the polity would determine whether or not in when they are put on a membership role, the polity and doctrine. And so that's biological growth. The transfer growth, Sam Rayner, breaks transfer growth into two areas. I'm just going to put it in one for simplicity. I would urge you to go read some of Sam's information on the types of growth, fascinating research that he has done. But transfer growth in its simplest form is someone who is a Christian moving from one church to another. Sam divides it into people who are new to the community, and they obviously is a healthy thing for them to look for a church home. And then he then talks about people who are moving within the community from church to church, affectionately known as church hoppers. That really is where I'm going to focus on transfer growth, though I will just keep it at one category. But the type of transfer growth that I am going to be talking about is primarily those who would move from one church to another within the community. Many times pastors, when they would see this phenomena, they say, all right, who's the hot church now? Where's the hot church? Because there would be a wave of people that would go to that church because it's the church of what's happening now. And they would go over to that church and they would transfer, some of them officially transfer their membership, and they would move to that church until they didn't like what that church was doing. And then the wave would move to another church. I've seen it move like a pig and a python through a community where it's just this bulge going from one church to another. Well, here's the reality. Many of these boomers who are transferring within the community, what were they doing? These boomers, my generation, the self-centered generation, the me generation, the what have you done for me lately, generation, what were we doing? What we were looking for the church that could best suit our needs, our desires, our wants, our preferences. We were kind of like that Burger King commercial. We're going to find the church where we can have it our way. We want preaching this way. We want music this way. We want facilities this way. We want programming this way. And so transfer growth largely became a phenomenon of the baby boomer generation who was the me generation, the self-centered generation. And we started counting transfer growth and this is a sad reality because they're wanting a whole lot of other growth. Okay, there's a bit of that biological growth that was really dependent upon children being born. Again, that's just a biological reality. And there was a little bit of conversion growth. That means we were reaching people with the gospel of Christ, but most of the growth in America, for over a half a century, most of the growth in America by church by church has been people moving from one church to another, which means what? It's a washout. It didn't always show up in membership because sometimes people wouldn't leave wouldn't officially take their membership away from a church and move to another one, but the attendance was a washout. And one of the reasons that we have not seen much healthy growth in the American church for over half a century is because we started rewarding transfer growth. Now, I won't talk about that in a series coming up soon about this whole thing about transfer growth. We started rewarding it. We started celebrating that transfer growth was just as good as conversion growth. In other words, if we almost had stole, I better be careful. If we willingly accepted members coming from another church, just because they were coming to our church to see what's happening there, if they can get their needs met. In other words, the circulation of the saints that takes place to many communities, if we were really doing that, we were bringing people in the church that were there for the wrong reasons. They were there for the most part because they had a self-centered attitude. They didn't want to serve. They wanted to be served. They didn't want to give. They wanted to be given to. They didn't want to evangelize because that was not comfortable for them, and they didn't want to minister because they wanted to be ministered to. We started celebrating transfer growth because we didn't have a lot of other growth in churches to talk about. And if you don't think that's reality, I'm going to challenge you to come to my three-part series that starts next week from this recording of three. I want to challenge you to come because I'm going to do a deep dive into the curse of transfer growth, and I'm going to be talking about how it is heard churches, particularly the American church. But I want to wrap it up this way. We've been talking about the baby boomers, that generation born between 1946 and 1964. We've been talking about that generation that changed culture, changed marketing, but became a phenomenon within itself. We've been talking about those 76 million who were born during 1946 and 1964. And my point in transfer growth is this generation that largely introduced us to the idea of transfer growth because they would move from one church to another to try to get their needs met. And here's the segue we're going to make. Now, after we've done this somewhat deep dive into the boomer generation, let's take a deep dive into transfer growth. And I'm going to be bold, if not a bit bodacious, and I'm going to call this the curse of transfer growth. And those will be the three episodes that we'll be looking at next week. And we'll talk more about the different types of growth as we begin to unpack it. But for now, we're going to leave the boomers. We've said enough about my generation. The generation has been talked about ad nauseam, and I'm ready to move on, even if it's my generation. Thank you, as always, for being a part of the church answer's podcast. Thank you on YouTube. We'd appreciate you subscribing, giving us a thumbs up for a like. And we thank you for being a part of the visual audience of church answers podcast. But also for our original audience who are always on their app, their favorite podcasting app. Thank you for listening. I don't take you for granted. I get ready. Next week, we'll be talking about the curse of transfer growth as we continue to unpack all things important for the local church. Own the church answers podcast. See you soon. 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