The following is from a UUA document on Membership Growth. It is important to understand that a congregation can not create sustained growth simply by adding numbers. A congregation must also help people grow spiritually, relationally and developmentally in response to the challenges of the world.
I recommend that we think about how congregations grow, and think about how we can apply these lessons because it will help Throop Church become the welcoming, inclusive, and active congregation that we have promised to work together to build.
"When we think of membership, we tend to think of numbers. Yet membership in a
Unitarian Universalist congregation is as much about quality as it is about quantity.
Unitarian Universalist congregations exist because of the free choice of their
members to be "gathered" into covenantal relationship with one another.
To put these points into a historical perspective, the concepts of free choice and
gathered were fairly extraordinary in the days of the early colonial Puritan settlers. Prior to this evolution in church governance, people went to the church of their own parish, which was a geographic location and, thus, an involuntary assignment of membership. The new concept of church became known as the free church. As current members of Unitarian Universalist congregations, we continue the covenantal relationship to "walk together" despite our differences in theological perspective. Walking together implies undertaking a journey of making meaning, which is very different from adherence to a creed.
Membership is a dynamic process rather than a single act. It begins when one makes the conscious choice to formally affiliate with a particular congregation--yet that decision marks the beginning of the membership journey rather than its end. In More Than Numbers: The Way Churches Grow, Loren Mead outlines four dimensions of growth and states that a growing, vital congregation would most likely be attending to each of these four aspects of membership:
• Numerical growth is best calculated by tracking how many attend per week at Sunday morning worship, in Sunday school, and at adult religious education programs. This number represents the active members and is also tied to the size of the budget and the number of activities offered by the congregation. The number of people who are reported by each Unitarian Universalist congregation to be active members is the number the Unitarian Universalist Association certifies annually.
• Maturational growth represents opportunities for members to deepen their faith and spiritual roots, as well as to increase their understanding of the spectrum of religious possibilities. This kind of growth also includes the ways in which, and the depth to which, the congregation cares for others. For maturational growth to occur, a congregation must empower members to contribute their unique talents and gifts for the well-being of the whole.
• Organic growth is growth of the congregation as a functioning community and an institution that can engage with other institutions of society. The term refers to healthy internal organizational structures such as policies, processes, practices, and programs; recruiting and succession-planning practices for leaders; evaluation mechanisms for programs, volunteers, and paid staff; and practices that deal with conflict openly and honestly.
• Incarnational growth is the ability to take the meanings and values of
Unitarian Universalism and make them real in the world outside the congregation. A congregation must be able to build itself into a religious community in which people can deepen their spiritual life, be challenged to live out their faith, and engage in the larger community to make the world more loving and just."
