lessons on spaghetti sauce and church growth ...

"Variety is the spice of life!" - William Cowper

One of the continual challenges that the church communities which I have been a part of over the last 15 years (six in total, ranging from a three-month stay in a city to a seven year stay in a city) have had is related to space. It seems that church communities are regularly found to be outgrowing their real-estate, which, in the words of that particular community is, "a great problem to have".

sidenote: It's less-often a problem in youth ministry situations because of the age-restrictions placed upon those groups. Although youth ministry generally has more growth on any given year than the rest of the church community, because students graduate out of the ministry at the end of middle or high school, numbers don't race skyward for long.
 

As a response to growth, churches generally choose one of four options to deal with this "great problem" that they have:

1.) Add to an additional service at a new time (in the same room) ...
2.) Build an expansion (expand the meeting room) ...
3.) Start a new church in the surrounding area (often called a church-plant) ...
4.) Start an addition service off-site, in the surrounding area, using a live-feed of the sermon (a relatively new trend refer to as "adding a campus")

Each of the above has both positives and negatives associated with it. One of the big positives to each of them is that there is the potential of creating a church gathering that has distinctly different personalities involved in the leadership, and, as a result, is attractive to a different segment of the local population ... in other words, more people are attracted to explore faith because the man or woman "up front" doesn't turn them off because of their raspy voice or their style of preaching or the fact that they have really bad halitosis (can someone pass me a piece of gum?!?)
Having said this, it is amazing to me how many leaders don't grasp this fact and proclaim that their idea of what a church gathering should look like and feel like and be like, is the only way! They really do need to learn a bit about spaghetti sauce ...

Fortunately, Malcolm Gladwell (of "The Tipping Point", "Blink" and now "Outliers" fame) has brought the wisdom of the sauce out into the open for all of us to learn from ... take the next 20 minutes, watch this bit, and consider how the principles might translate into the "great problem" we've been exploring above ...