Thom Rainer as President of the Rainer Group is a church growth consultant who was inspired to write this book based on Jim Collins' book, Good to Great.
The book Breakout Churches tells the story of 13 local churches that did not accept the status quo. These are not just 13 randomly selected churches - they had to meet a very strict set of criteria, and were measured against a control group. The 13 churches were shortlisted from 50,000 churches researched.
The Rainer Group believes that any healthy church should be reaching one person with the gospel every 2 weeks. They were looking for churches that had an annual conversion rate of 26 people; that is, it takes 20 members one year to reach one person. There were other strict criteria too, including the requirement that the decline or slump, then the breakout, occured under the same Pastor.
Each of the 13 churches had a "Chrysalis factor" which was the trigger for growth. The Chrysalis factor had some commonalities in the 13 churches that the control group did not have.
A common factor of breakout churches is that they have "Servant Leaders", which is a great study in itself and may feature as a blogspot in the future!
I am forever struck by Rainer's claim that"It is a sin to be good if God has called us to be great".Rainer quotes Bill Orr,
"Churches do not remain plateaued. They either begin to grow again or they begin to die."(That quote was a trigger for me to read the book "Autopsy of a Deceased Church", also by Rainer!)
Rainer provides some fascinating graphs of breakout church growth, and spends some time discussing leadership. The key to Rainer's discussion of leadership focuses on the Acts 6/7 leader as a "Legacy Leader" (less than 1% of senior pastors according to his research). He discloses that many of these legacy leaders (or Breakout Church Pastors) are reluctant leaders, and further, that there were no autocratic leaders in Breakout Churches.
Reinforcing the value of small groups, one of the Breakout Churches reported that most of their ministry occurs in small groups that meet in homes, and they have a strategy to plant a new church every time they reach 500 members. This comes with a warning:
"Members who are involved in worship services alone tend to drift toward inactivity."Small groups provide opportunities to grow in spiritual health.
Growth will not occur unless local church leaders are willing to confront reality. When you confront reality as a church leader, you will have what Rainer refers to as the "ABC moment" (Awareness, Belief and Crisis). Rainer points out the risk of a church being inward looking, and the "deadly path" that follows as slow erosion. The common factor in the ABC moment was that many of the leadership shared the experience, not just the senior pastor.
In his "how-to" or "where-to-from-here" chapter entitled "The Who/What Simultrack", Rainer quotes Collins emphasising:
'(the importance of getting) "the right people on the bus, the wrong people off the bus and the right people in the right seats" and then figuring out where to drive the bus'Rainer describes the fascinating concept of the Freedom/Expectation Paradox and demonstrates why all Breakout Churches are alone in the High Expectation/High Freedom quadrant.
He describes how in some churches, the (program) becomes the tail wagging the dog, and some churches that don't have a vision even have the wagging tail, but no dog. In speaking about innovation, he points out that innovation follows the growth of the church, unlike many churches where a new facility is constructed with the hope that it will engender growth itself.
Resilience is a key factor throughout the book. Rainer says,
"The cost of becoming a breakout church, ironically, is most often the result of problems and conflicts with other believers. Many of the comparison church leaders grew weary of the struggle with fellow Christians. The breakout church leaders had no fewer conflicts, but they decided to persevere despite the pain and struggles."Breakout Churches is a sound read and in my opinion is a good companion book for Becoming a Level 5 Multiplying Church by Todd Wilson and Dave Ferguson. Breakout Churches is another quality book that can't be summed up adequately in a short article!
Breakout Churches is published by Zondervan. I read the ePub version which I downloaded from iBooks. At the time of publishing this article, it was on Amazon.com.au for $11.99.
