Church Growth

Welcome to the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast.

Well, church growth, is it dead? I've heard about that so often, so today I sit down with church planter Andrew Hopper, and we talk about the overcorrection against church growth and why we shouldn't celebrate church decline.

It's a fascinating conversation and one that I think is kind of overdue.

So if you're tuning in for the first time, welcome.

He also was mentored under JD Greear at the Summit Church.

JD is a podcast alumnus.

And so why don't we just dive right into my conversation on the resistance to church growth, and maybe why we need to rethink that, with Andrew Hopper.

Andrew, I've been looking forward to this conversation.

And yeah, I get the point that there are some platforms, of course, that are less reliable than others.

But the tribalism is something I've started to talk about a whole lot because, and I think, I don't know if I can make this make sense, but I think after hearing your answer to the last question, it's starting to make sense when you think about the self-help approach, the church growth.

I mean, this is a literal profession.

People are church growth strategists.

Like, that's a profession, right? Where they apply modern pop psychology to church growth to try to get the most amount of people in the seats.

Well, what's naturally going to happen when you do that is you have to water down the gospel because the gospel is hard.

The Christian life is hard.

Jesus promised that we're going to have trouble in the world.