Breakout Churches by Thom S. Rainer, “2005”

Breakout Churches by Thom S. Rainer

Introduction

The book starts by making a powerful but sobering statement: God desires the church to be His powerful instrument on this earth, but if churches are content to remain “good” instead of striving for greatness, Rainer argues that this shortfall is a sin. He goes on to define what he means by the title. Out of the thousands of observed churches, only 13 have undergone a true revival that occurred without a change in leadership. The transformation is so powerful that there must be some similar factors, events, or triggers that increase the success rate of breaking out .

The first area is the leadership of the church. This is more than a chapter on qualities of a good Christian leader. Instead, it focuses on attributes of the pastors that are successful at causing a church to break out. Two of the biggest factors are a persistence and desire to act in faith to realize the goals that God has for their church. Rainer describes an “Acts 6/7” style of leadership where the pastor is quick to allow others to share in the ministry and success of the entire church. This (highest) level of leadership is one where the leader makes decisions based on the long-term health of the church instead of the immediate benefits that can be experienced while he is still in control.

This is a thought-provoking and helpful book for any church that wants to become more missional and more effective in advancing the Gospel.  The author and his research team examined data for 52,333 churches, of which only 13 met all their criteria for a breakout church :

 

A minimum of 26 converts in at least one of the past five years.

A maximum ratio of 20 members or regular attendees to one convert in at least one of the last five years.  In other words, there was at least one convert for every 20 members or regular attendees (whichever was higher).

A period of decline in attendance followed by at least five years of sustained growth.

These criteria clearly select churches that had become much more missional without a change in leadership.  The conventional wisdom is that a stagnant church that wants to become missional needs to hire a new pastor, and a pastor of a stagnant church that wants to lead a missional church is better off starting all over again and planting a new church.  This book seeks to find exceptions to this conventional wisdom and concludes that there are some, but not many.  Extrapolating their research (they found only 13 breakout churches out of the 52,333 for which they had data) to the 400,000 churches in America would suggest that there are no more than 100-200 breakout churches in America.

It must be said, however, that their criterion that there be at least 26 converts in at least one of the last five years seems to eliminate a lot of small ...