{"id":848769,"date":"2025-04-24T05:00:45","date_gmt":"2025-04-24T10:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/?p=848769"},"modified":"2025-04-22T15:40:00","modified_gmt":"2025-04-22T20:40:00","slug":"an-insight-i-gained-from-thom-rainer-almost-30-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/churchanswers.com\/blog\/an-insight-i-gained-from-thom-rainer-almost-30-years-ago\/","title":{"rendered":"An Insight I Gained from Thom Rainer almost 30 Years Ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was a PhD student at Southern Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, and Thom Rainer was the dean of the Billy Graham School of Missions, Evangelism, and Church Growth. When Thom invited me to join a research project for a book that he was writing, I jumped at the chance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That 1995 research project looked at 576 growing Southern Baptist churches to determine what made them evangelistic. Part of my responsibility was to tabulate the results of a survey we sent to these churches. Believe it or not, I tabulated the results by recording answers on graph paper in those days. The work was tedious at times, but the book resulting from the study, <\/span>Effective Evangelistic Churches<\/span><\/i><\/a>, quickly caught the attention of pastors and other church leaders.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What most intrigued me about that study was the focus: we studied only churches that were seeing growth through reaching non-believers. The churches we studied at the time were churches that met these criteria, in Thom\u2019s words:<\/span><\/p>\n

We somewhat arbitrarily decided to examine only those churches whose annual baptismal total exceeded twenty-five for that year. We then determined that a church must have a baptismal ratio (resident members\/baptisms) of less than 20:1. In other words, the church was reaching at least one person for Christ for every twenty members.[i]\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

We have adjusted the criteria over the years in defining an \u201ceffective evangelistic church,\u201d but the principle remains the same: we want to make sure we\u2019re studying churches that are growing by conversion growth rather than by transfer growth. That is to say, we study growing churches who are reaching non-believers rather than only swapping sheep with other churches.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

And, that\u2019s the insight I gained from Thom so many years ago: <\/span>church growth studies must focus on studying churches that are actually reaching non-believers<\/span><\/i>. These churches live on the front edge of \u201cmake disciples\u201d (Matt 28:19) even as they typically also have intentional discipleship plans to keep those they reach. It\u2019s simply not enough to study growing churches without asking the source of their growth.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

What might surprise you, though, is <\/span>how <\/span><\/i>that insight I gained almost thirty years ago has affected my life since then.<\/span><\/p>\n