A mother church (a church that plants other churches) would often ask me to help reach these former attendees. And, I would interview them in focus groups. I found they didn’t often leave the church because of a tension or disagreement … but because of access. As they grew in their faith and became more involved in the church, they also were no longer traveling just once or twice a week to the church. Because of ministry opportunities, committee meetings, training, etc. they were now driving multiple times every week to a church. Their journey of discipleship was being impaired, because longer travel distances created a barrier to access.

There’s always been an almost impenetrable barrier to church health and growth. But innovators such as Charles Fuller, Billy Graham, Chuck Smith and David Fusco have been able to break it. What is this barrier and why is it so powerful?
For almost 40 years, researchers have found that the distance people will drive to a church is a main factor in their attendance and long-term commitment. Recent research from the Baylor University Religion Survey confirmed this. Baylor found that a majority (68%) of church attendees drive under 15 minutes to a church. While this pertains to the majority of attendees, some may drive longer in rural areas and shorter in congested areas.
Research continues to support that this four-decade thesis holds true: the majority of your attendees will always be coming from within a 15-minute drive.
How I learned about this barrier from my mega-church experience.
As I was studying church plants as the minister of evangelism and church growth at a megachurch, I found that the majority of people who stopped attending our church did so because they found a church closer to where they lived. I remember interviewing one person who said, “We liked the preaching. And the worship was outstanding. But we travel almost 40 minutes each way. And that’s time we could spend as a family. And, as we got more involved, we traveled back and forth even more often. Now there’s a church just 10 minutes from our house. It isn’t as good, but it’s good enough.”
After interviewing dozens of people, I discovered that an initial factor in their attendance was the good preaching and excellent worship of our mega-congregation. But over time the tedium of a longer drive would wear upon the attendees. They would then find a church nearer home. It might not offer preaching or worship as professionally. But the shorter drive would promote more family time, as well as allow more trips back and forth in their volunteer efforts.
My thesis, in part, was that though initially attracted by high-quality preaching and music, over time people found a church nearby that was “similar enough” in theology, worship, volunteer opportunities and quality.
What causes this barrier? Access. Here are first two of three principles to overcome it.
I would soon be asked to help coach churches that were suffering from this barrier. I discovered the solution usually involves three principles.
1. As people are moving out of the neighborhood and into areas further than a 15-minute drive away, there are new cultures springing up around most churches.
Sometimes called suburban flight, more recently it’s occurred in the reverse, with a gentrification of urban areas (i.e. young suburbanites moving back to the inner city).
Read More
Related Posts:

One of the reasons we often wither in the faith, become susceptible to temptation, or simply “get into a rut” is a lack of regular fellowship with Christians outside of our own family. Make it your habit to meet with Christians, of the same sex, for regular fellowship and seek out Christians who are further along in their walk to be your mentors. Often in scriptures like Titus 2 we see it taken for granted that older Christian women will mentor younger Christian women, and that older Christian men will mentor younger Christian men. These brothers and sisters will pray for you, exhort you, teach you, and stir you up to love and good works. They will also keep you accountable in ways the world NEVER will.

1) Read Your Bible Before you read your email, log in to Face Book, turn on the radio, etc.
Far too many of us spend time in the world, before we spend time in the Word and as a result we begin the day with the wrong frame of mind and perspective, and not having “broken our fast” by partaking of the bread of heaven. For many people, this means that they begin the day having partaken of things that cause them to be irritable, anxious, or distracted, rather than filled with the things that promote peace, contentment, and knowledge. If we wonder why we are weak in the faith, it might just be because our primary diet consists of things that are not spiritual food. Let your first meal in the morning be the milk and meat of the Word of God!
“Oh, how I love Your law! It is my meditation all the day. You, through Your commandments, make me wiser than my enemies; For they are ever with me. I have more understanding than all my teachers, For Your testimonies are my meditation.” (Psalm 119:97-99)
2) Start attending the church events you normally miss
If there is one thing we learn from the Apostolic church, it is that they never missed an opportunity to worship together. “And they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.” (Acts 2:42) This should still be the fondest desire of every Christian’s heart. “I was glad when they said to me, “Let us go into the house of the LORD.” (Psalm 122:1) But it is also something that we desperately need for our growth. Indeed, the Christians who are growing the most in the faith are almost invariably the ones who spend the most time in worship and study. Sometimes people really are providentially hindered from attending the services of the church, but more often than not we have simply made a decision not to go. There are many excuses we can generate for not coming to both worship services on Sunday or the Bible Study or the Prayer Meeting, but how often can we honestly say, “Lord, the thing that I am doing instead of going to church is more important than worshipping you with the saints and is better for my spiritual growth?” Do we really think that the eternal blessings that we gain from attending on the means of grace will not outweigh the temporary hassles of traveling to church? Do we expect that in heaven we will say, “I’m glad I didn’t go to church more often?” or that if we did attend all the church services we could that we will regret doing so?
Finally, before you protest that you would be physically exhausted if you attended more of the services of the church, make sure that there aren’t other activities you could cut out that would enable you to get more rest. Often church is the first thing we remove from our schedule rather than the last. Christians are by definition people who hope to spend eternity in the corporate worship of the Lord, and we need to begin living now as we mean to continue forever afterwards. Remember, we can suffer from a lack of grace, but it is impossible to suffer from having gotten too much of it!
“not forsaking the assembling of ourselves together, as is the manner of some, but exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the Day approaching.” (Heb. 10:25)
3) Begin and Stick to a Pattern of Daily Family Worship
Properly understood there are three different spheres in which worship should take place; privately, as we do our personal devotions, corporately, as we assemble for worship with the other saints on the Lord’s Day, and household, as families assemble to worship together on a daily basis.
While all the different spheres of worship have declined in modern times, perhaps none has suffered quite so much as family worship, and I believe that the results of this decline can be seen in the exodus of covenant children from the church. Simply put, an hour of corporate worship or even an hour of corporate worship and a youth program like AWANA cannot ever replace daily household worship and instruction. Fathers, you and not your pastor, youth pastor, or Sunday school worker have been charged with bringing up your children in the training and admonition of the Lord (Eph. 6:4). You simply cannot do this without following that daily pattern of instruction and worship set out in Deuteronomy 6. Additionally, Family Worship is a bulwark of any marriage, and you will find that although it is a cliche, there is a LOT of truth to the saying “The Family that Prays Together, Stays Together.” Indeed, it isn’t surprising to see that as family worship has declined, divorce rates have increased. In 10 years of pastoring, I have yet to encounter a family that kept a regular pattern of daily family worship that was on the verge of divorce.
Many families are intimidated by the thought of starting a pattern of family worship because they were not brought up doing it themselves, and were thus never taught how to worship at home. The keys to starting off a successful program of family worship are simplicity and consistency. If you have never done it before, I would recommend you start this way.
First, pick an event that the entire family already does together, such as eating a meal like then covenant that as soon as you have finished your meal you will assemble together for family worship. Keep your family worship simple and brief, and make your family wish there were more of it rather than wish that it would finally end. A sample pattern for worship might include:

Father or Mother Prays
Father reads a short selection from the Bible (no more than a chapter!) that he is familiar with and can explain, or from a good family devotional like the ones written by Jim Cromarty.
Father explains the text and asks the children some questions about the text designed to stimulate thought and conversation
The family closes by praying together and offering up their individual praises and requests to God

Later, after your worship has grown consistent, you can begin gradually adding in other items like singing and reciting the Shorter Catechism, Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, etc.
“We will not hide them from their children, Telling to the generation to come the praises of the LORD, And His strength and His wonderful works that He has done. For He established a testimony in Jacob, And appointed a law in Israel, Which He commanded our fathers, That they should make them known to their children; That the generation to come might know them, The children who would be born, That they may arise and declare them to their children, That they may set their hope in God, And not forget the works of God, But keep His commandments” (Psalm 78:4-7)
4) Start Reading Systematically Through the Bible
One of the trends that has emerged over the years is that while Christians read email, text messages, magazines, novels, and Facebook, they rarely read the bible. The bible reading that does go on is either needs based (I have to read this for a bible study) or random. The result of this is that bible knowledge amongst Christians is declining at a precipitous rate. As an example of that, one seminary president pointed out that while it used to be the case that only 1/3 of the incoming class failed the English bible exam, now only 1/3 of the incoming class pass the English bible exam.
Read More

Written by C. R. Carmichael |
Thursday, July 14, 2022
According to the latest information from the Pew Research Center, Christians suffer more than any other religious group from various governmental and societal hostilities around the world today. Because of this reality, we should have the empathy to be more mindful of our Gospel call to comfort others who are in any affliction (2 Corinthians 1:4), and to bear with the failings of the weak, and not to please ourselves” (Romans 15:1).

Have you noticed the ugly trend of certain ideologically-driven factions painting their opponents as less than human? Or the ruling elites and angry protesters calculating a person’s human worth based on their perceived usefulness to society?
Recent examples of this kind of behavior may surprise you. They include an abortion advocate who painted the words “Not Yet Human” on her exposed, very-pregnant belly; a prominent church leader tweeting out: “Whiteness is an unrelenting, demonic force of evil”; and a Rutgers professor who pronounced that white people are “committed to being villains” who need to be “taken out.”
Such vile attempts to strip away the intrinsic value of an individual or group in order to legitimize their social banishment or destruction is called “dehumanization,” and it is re-emerging as a potent force in our toxic culture these days.
Figuratively speaking, it is like trying to eliminate someone with the cold precision of a sniper’s bullet. Dehumanization, in both its passive and active forms, is attempting to erase a person. It attempts to erase a person’s purpose, erase their unique gifts, erase their value, erase their morality, and equate them with expendable animals to be caged, experimented on, or swiftly put down at the perpetrator’s discretion.
One might rightly ask how this immoral act can exist in our so-called enlightened age. You would think that the attempt to relegate a group of people to a subhuman or abstract category would be considered abhorrent in our modern society—especially after the travesties of American slavery, the Holocaust, or the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. Surely the emphatic statement, “Never again!” has been the foundational declaration of a wiser, more compassionate world over the last century, has it not?
Yet here we are in the midst of a sweeping new “cancel culture” of hate.
Dehumanization Emerges From Spiritual Disease
If you go by a majority of prevalent “woke” attitudes in American society today, dehumanization is the preferred weapon of choice—especially in the Wild West of social media and rage-filled protests. White people, political conservatives and the unborn appear to be the popular new targets, and are now sharing space with historically-oppressed minority groups. Yet the hatred directed at them still reeks of the age-old spiritual diseases of racism, bigotry, and rebellion against God.
Needless to say, it is astonishing to find how easily these twisted, hateful attitudes have become the endorsed rhetoric of our time. The latest diatribes against another race or creed is no more acceptable than when they were spoken against the Jews in Nazi Germany or African-Americans in the Old South. And yet such similar malevolence against certain brothers and sisters of our society is often celebrated by our ruling elites and propagated by corporate mainstream media as a way to control the populace through division or to intimidate those who stand in the way of their influence and power.
Today’s virtual murderers, regardless of their particular ideology or political bent, utilize the evil process of dehumanization so they can justify their violent behavior towards their “enemies” in the hope of erasing their opposing ideas from view. As journalist Slavenka Drakulic once explained it, “When a person is reduced to an abstraction, one is free to hate him because the moral obstacle has already been abolished.” Or as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn put it: “To do evil a human being must first of all believe that what he’s doing is good.”
The problem with using dehumanization as a vehicle for righteous indignation, however, is that it doesn’t have a shred of moral integrity in its makeup. The Bible, the God-breathed standard for morality and ethics, doesn’t allow for this kind of evil among men. Why? Because the Bible has revealed to us this great truth: human beings were created in the image of God!
Dehumanization Disrespects The Image Of God
Indeed, from the beginning of the Biblical narrative, we are told that mankind is unique among creation because men and women, unlike the other living creatures on Earth, have been created in the likeness of God. “God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them” (Genesis 1:27).
This is why murder is considered so heinous. The shedding of human blood is a rebellious assault against the unique and sacred relationship between God and those who bear His image on earth (Genesis 9:6).
What an amazing thought to know that we all bear, in some profound way, the image of God regardless of race, creed or societal standing.
Read More
Related Posts: