Welcome to the Home Page of Church Growth Modelling

What is Church Growth?

It is the discipline that seeks to analyse why Christian churches, at various levels of organisation, grow or decline. This includes both their spiritual growth as well as their numerical growth.

Church growth thinking can be divided into two strands:

The Church Growth Movement, which is based with Christian denominations and exists to serve their needs. It is based on theological principles.

The Social Science Strand whose focus is primarily academic research and has a sociological basis.

Both strands use data gathering and statistical analysis to understand the nature of quantitative church growth.

What is Church Growth Modelling?

It is an attempt to understand the dynamics of church growth using mathematics and system dynamics methods.

Its aims are:

• to produce theories of how churches grow, in the sense of why the numbers of people in churches change the way they do;  
• to discover broad principles that describe the growth;  
• to provide a theoretical framework that can assess strategies of church growth;  
• to help decide what sort of data should be gathered to best reflect a church's effectiveness;  

It involves the use population modelling, simulation, and has overlap with theories of social diffusion and particularly its applications in marketing.

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Summary of Work

Hypotheses

• The faith is largely spread through enthusiasts, or "active" believers. These are active in recruitment distinguishing them from "inactive" believers who play little role in recruitment.  
• Most conversion growth comes from contact between an enthusiast and an unbeliever. The numbers converted being proportional to the numbers of both.  
• The enthusiastic phase of a believer only lasts a certain length of time, after which they become inactive  

 Results

• There is a threshold over which large scale "revival-type" growth occurs. This depends on the number of unbelievers.  
• The number of enthusiasts does not affect whether such substantial growth occurs. If there are smaller number enthusiasts the same growth occurs over as longer period..  
• The threshold depends on the number of people converted per enthusiast. Thus it is the "amount of enthusiasm" that governs the growth.
• Growth will end because the church runs out of enthusiasts, not because the number of unbelievers runs out. As people are converted enthusiasts are less likely to meet unconverted people, leading to a failure to make sufficient enthusiasts.  
• It is more beneficial for growth to increase the effectiveness of enthusiasts than to increase their numbers. A small number of effective evangelisers are better than a large number of less effective ones.  
• When the population of a church is small compared to the surrounding unbelieving society it can be a long time before a revival among believers can see significant growth in the church. 
• In summary it is the spiritual vitality of the enthusiasts that drives the growth of the church. More life gives more growth, provided that life is directed into contact with unbelievers. Read Acts 2:42-47 & 4:12-16 for a Biblical understanding of this principle.  
• Go to Summary of Results for more.

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Contact Details

Postal and phone contact is via the Division of Mathematics and Statistics at the University of Glamorgan, details at division's research page.

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