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How to Increase Church Attendance

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Our youngest son Jimmy, always the adventurous type, decided to leave the safety and comfort of the Lone Star State (Texas) to continue his education after high school at Babson College—a private, but well-known business college founded in 1919 in Wellesley, Massachusetts, a town west of Boston.

So, it did not surprise his father or me that as an adult, he decided to collect the antique book versions written by the founder of his college—Roger W. Babson.

As most parents would be, we were grateful he did not want to start a collection of weird things like banana stickers, toenail clippings, or super-soakers! So, books were a great choice since I could find and give these rare books for birthday and Christmas gifts—if I could find them.

Babson was an American entrepreneur, economist, and business theorist. He predicted the Wall Street Crash of 1929, was the Prohibition Party’s candidate for President of the United States in 1940 although the election was won by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was also a religious man.

Babson authored over 40+ books on various topics—mainly business-related topics, but one book that he wrote, with the help of others, is titled How to Increase Church Attendance. It is this rare book that I found for Jimmy’s recent birthday present from a source I will not disclose to anyone.

Before wrapping Jimmy’s birthday gift, I read the book and took notes. Being a book published in 1936, it was fascinating to see how religious men from over 80 years ago perceived church attendance.

I desire that the following quotes from Babson’s book will make you laugh, ponder, and/or possibly change how you do church today!

Ministers, Leaders, and the Church

The personality and the pastoral work of the minister [is] very important. [It] is fundamental to a successful church.

If a church [cannot] afford a decent plant, it should consider consolidating with another church. In such cases, the churches with the poorer plants should sell their property and use the funds for renovating and extending [with] some other church in the community.

Trained teachers who are willing to give their services in the Sunday School should be exempt from making contributions.

All in the community, whether or not they attend church, should contribute to some church.

A Sunday should never go by without the minister making a public appeal for those who wish to give their hearts to Jesus.

The church is like a muscle—the more we use it, the stronger it becomes, while the less we use it, the weaker it becomes.

There are twice as many churches as there should be.

It is an outworn custom to count only those at the Sunday morning preaching service. We should also count the number who come to the church each week for any service of worship.

We should attend church . . .  to show our colors—to show the community and our family where we stand.

Every layman should go to church, irrespective of [the] preacher, music, ventilation, or cushions.

“Here [are] my suggestions for a church membership pledge,” exclaimed Roger Babson.

====================

To the ………………………………. Church,

I desire to develop my spiritual life and the spiritual life of others. As one means of doing this, I desire to join the ………………………………. Church.

I shall endeavor to bring my family or friends to your church, or to some other church if I am away, every Sunday.

I ask that you get in touch with me any week that you do not see or hear from me. I have checked the two lists on the reverse of this sheet showing the specific help which I most need, and also the line of work in which I may perhaps be most helpful to you.

Date ……………………………….            (S) ………………………………..

I FEEL THE MOST NEED OF:

Meditation

Learning to pray

Courage and Faith

Instruction

Help with my family

Better health

Economic assistance

New friends

General guidance

CAN BE THE MOST HELPFUL TO OTHERS IN:

Service of Worship

Teaching in Sunday School

Helping on the music

Leading young people

Caring for little children

Adult educational work

Boys’ Club Projects

Calling on the sick

Supplying flowers

====================

Causes for the Decline in Church Attendance

  1. Many seem to fear neither God nor man.
  2. Secondary motives for attending church, i.e. to help a man’s business or better his political prospects.
  3. Competing calls—competition; movies, reading newspapers.
  4. “The Waiting Mood”—People have ceased to seek. They wait to be sought.
  5. Indifference—church people are tremendously interested in many things. We must present the advantages of church attendance.
  6. Dissatisfaction with the tenets and teachings of the church. [Basically, the church does not seem to meet their needs and the needs of the age.]

The church should work for the well-being of the people.

Vitalizing the Sermon and Worship

  1. [There] must be an essential truth to the sermon. People want spiritual food they can understand.
  2. Holy zeal is necessary.
  3. Better craftsmanship is needed.
  4. Use other materials when necessary.
  5. Use the Bible.
  6. Sermons should be practical.
  7. Add news value to sermons. The use of such living materials … imparts a new freshness and impressiveness to the church service.
  8. Select “pulling subjects”—good topics and titles.
  9. Personal character—the personal life of the preacher must be a living example of Christianity.

Improving the Church Structure

  1. Ugly, badly arranged churches, if continued in use, will become more detrimental to church attendance.
  2. The equipment is very important.
  3. What, essentially, is required in order that a room be made effective as a place of worship? When one enters the room from the majestic out-of-doors, does he feel, upon coming within the building, a sense of uplifting and enlargement, even though the building may be small? Proportions [matter].
  4. Remove distractions—old chandeliers; Pleasant lanterns suspended from the ceiling will add much to the appearance and churchliness.
  5. Remove bad art glass.
  6. Good acoustics.
  7. Little things count for much.
  8. Eliminate all ugliness, barrenness, and things that divert attention from the holy exercise of divine worship.
  9. Cloakrooms will enable people to enter the sanctuary unencumbered without wraps, hats, and overshoes.

The Home and Church Attendance

  1. Regarding birth control, we do not have enough children in our church homes today to replenish our ranks in the next generation.
  2. The key individual to interest boys and girls in attending church is, of course, the minister. In the first place, he must be fond of children.
  3. The minister’s wife sets the example with herself and 5 children, and oftentimes four or five other children, [by] all sitting together in the fourth pew from the front.

Public Records on Church Attendance

Finance and attendance are both matters about which is the duty of all members to be informed.

Church Attendance and Theological Education

  1. A divinity school is a place for study. Its chief purpose is to train men in the major disciplines of theological education, not to equip students with a bag of tricks for drawing crowds.

Making the Community Church-Minded

  1. To have a great church, there must be two very essential factors; first-numbers; and second-loyalty.
  2. Two things impress the visitor—the height and central location of the pulpit.

Week-Day Religious Education

  1. For children and youth, religious education teachers should mostly be college or university graduates who have specialized in Bible and education.
  2. There is no need, however, for a church [to] lower its dignity by using the competitive methods of secular institutions, to draw people to its programs.
  3. [There needs to be] a firm belief that the church has something to offer.

Advertising

  1. The finest kind of advertising for any community, industry, merchandise, or even a church is the personal words [in] which one customer passes on to another.
  2. The great reason for non-church attendance among so-called Christians is the unregenerate conditions of their hearts.

Church Attendance and Prayer

  1. The heart of the church is prayer. If there is no place of prayer, or if the place of prayer is inadequate and weak, then no matter how enormous the church building might be, no matter how large the church membership, the church is a dying church.
  2. We cannot return to the old-fashioned testimonial meeting. It is as defunct as the old one-horse shay. (I had to look up the definition of a one-horse shay. It is a light, covered, two-wheeled carriage for two persons, drawn by a single horse.)
  3. But when we discarded the old shay, we did not leave our barn empty, we then filled it with a new automobile.

Six classes of people who attend church

  1. Those present every Sunday
  2. Others attending generally
  3. Others frequently
  4. Others occasionally
  5. Others rarely, and
  6. Others annually (on Easter)

Church Loyalty Projects

  1. Have a project.
  2. These works because they present specific achievements and friendly contests.

What about the Future?

  1. While the movies, the radio, comic supplements, and the automobile…have great power for good, they today are to too great an extent, undermining the character, health, and success of our children. Yet, we tacitly show our approval of these inroads by attending questionable movies and listening to everything on the radio.
  2. Before the development of modern advertising, motion pictures, and radio, many more of us spent our Sundays attending church services and reading good books.
  3. Today we are reading the sports and stock market pages, attending the movies, and listening to cheap radio patter.
  4. Hence, it behooves us to withhold a proper proportion of our time and money from these less important things and to devote the same to personally attending and financially supporting the churches.
  5. [To] help our children recognize the importance of character and the spiritual life, we must have them know that we put church attendance above the Sunday newspaper, the movie, and listening to the radio.
  6. [The most] efficient and inexpensive method of developing character among children and the community, in general, is to have them see us and their neighbors attend church.
  7. In conclusion, our studies would seem to indicate that the Protestant churches of America are today suffering from inertia, from lack of sufficient interest. Hence it would be time well spent if our clergymen and laymen would seriously consider an “over-hauling” and thorough examination.
  8. Statistics show that all institutions go downhill, which [does] not keep abreast or ahead of the times.

Miscellaneous

  1. Go through the list of church members with the thoroughness that a business organization would apply and prepare a list of those who do not go to church.
  2. Some may need to be dropped from the church roll.
  3. Others can be transplanted to other churches.
  4. But some will be quickened to resume their interest in the local church.

I hope you liked these quotes as much as I did. And, after reading this book, I am glad Jimmy no longer collects baseball cards, sneakers, or sunglasses! Books are good. And rare books are even better!

Bible Verses:

I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. Matthew 16:18

I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. Matthew 16:18 NASB
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Whether, then, you eat or drink or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God. 1 Corinthians 10:31

For the love of money is a root of all sorts of evil, and some by longing for it have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs. 1 Timothy 6:10

Prayer:

Jesus, let me love my church as You did. Let me honor and respect the holy place You have provided for me to worship in. Give me a love for the people in the church—no matter our differences, personalities, or Bible knowledge. May all I do within the church body be pleasing and acceptable to You. In the precious name of Jesus, I pray. Amen.

God Bless.

 

Central Houston Inspirational Writers Alive! Associate Member; BibleGateway Blogger, Member; SBC, Church Member

Works Cited

Babson, Roger. How to Increase Church Attendance: The Commission on Church Attendance. New York: Fleming H. Revell, 1936.

[Roger W. Babson, Rev. Edwin H. Byington, Rev. Hudson E. Fiebiger, Winslow L. Webber, Rev. Gail Cleland, Elbert M. Conover, Rev. Clement F. Hahn, Rev. George L. Thurlow, Rev. Edwin B. Robinson, Rev. Vaughan Dabney, Rev. John L. Keedy, Rev. Robert W. Gammon, James B. McKendry, Rev. Daniel Bliss, Rev. Arthur L. Kingsolving; and Rev. Herbert D. Rugg.]

Bible verses are from the New American Standard Bible.

Christian Living, Life Issues, Prayer, Testimonies

From a Mother’s Heart: Praying Christian Community into Existence

Video

From a Mother’s Heart: Praying Christian Community into Existence / by Patti Greene, Greene Pastures by Patti

[From Email notifications, click the title for best web viewing]

Our family lives in Houston, Texas. In the fall of 2004, our son Jimmy started his first year at Babson College. It was during this time that God impressed on my heart the absolute need for believers to dwell in union and community in Jesus Christ.

In high school Jimmy applied to many colleges, but after much prayer he made the decision to attend Babson in the Boston, Massachusetts area – which is 1,848 miles away from home.

For background, we are a middle-class family. Jimmy attended a public high school and was raised in Bible-believing churches. Our church, and church friends, were always like family to us.

Jimmy stayed his first year at Babson, but the calls and emails home were increasingly breaking this mom’s heart. That first year was tough for him; for the first time, he was competing with private school kids, prep school kids, and kids much more ingrained in education than he was. The academic standards were higher than expected.

Jimmy was unhappy, stressed, and deeply regretting his college choice. He attended a high school with 3,500 students. He was class president for four years and an outstanding athlete. However, Babson was a D-3 school and there wasn’t much pride in the sports arena compared to D-1 schools. This college was strictly an upper level business school whose attendees consisted of those who considered attending other prestigious schools, e.g. Harvard, Yale, MIT. We were all astonished this was where Jimmy was being led by God to attend. It didn’t make sense to us other than Jimmy had a deep desire to attend a school in the Northeast where he would be challenged academically.

Every day I would come home from work, and I would pray long, hard, and continuously for him. It was sad because my two older children enjoyed their college life, but this post-secondary adversity was a new experience for both my husband, Jimmy, and myself.

I prayed more than I had ever prayed for anything in my life. I prayed for him to find a church family. I prayed for Christian friends. I prayed for him to find a Bible-believing church. I prayed for him to be strong in his faith. I prayed for him to become closer to the Lord. I prayed he would read his Bible. The list could go on and on.

This mom’s heart was breaking. Tears flowed almost daily.

I had been made aware of “prayer-walking” although I had never done it in a church situation before. GotQuestions.org, an online source for answering Biblical questions, defines prayer-walking as “the practice of praying on location, a type of intercessory prayer that involves walking to or near a particular place while praying.” ¹ While unable to be on the Massachusetts campus myself, I decided to prayer walk in my own creative way.

I sat down in the chair in which I normally pray in with a map of the college campus. I “walked” around the campus in my mind, praying for what happened in each dorm. I prayed for Jimmy to meet nice people in the cafeteria and prayed for his classes. Thus, within time, I had prayed for every building on campus, including the chapel, which was mostly used for lectures, not religious events.

I seemed to dwell and pray more in and around the chapel. Of course, in my mind, the chapel represented God, Jesus, the Bible, and the Holy Spirit.

I continued to pray fervently and long. I prayed for any Christian church to reach out in ministry. I prayed for Christian influences to show up. I prayed for spiritual strength. I prayed for the Lord to speak to others to help. I prayed for the community people. I prayed because I love my son and I wanted him to be happy and to keep his Christian faith strong during college.

Campus Crusade for Christ (now known as CRU for Crusade) had occasional meetings on the campus. While CRU was helping to fulfill the Great Commission by winning people to faith in Jesus Christ and building them in their faith, more was needed, e.g. fellowship, Bible study, opportunities to serve.

I was reading the Bible constantly looking for verses to help him and to guide myself in what to tell him.

I was touched by Bible Verses such as:

My soul melts away for sorrow; strengthen me according to your word! (Psalm 119:28).

Redeem [him] from the oppression of men, that [he] may obey your precepts. (Psalm 119:134)

And we prayed to our God and set a guard as a protection against them day and night. (Nehemiah 4:9)

Most importantly, I prayed for students to come to a saving knowledge of Jesus Christ as their Savior. I claimed verses for these college students to have the ability to stay strong in their beliefs and to avoid evil and temptations.

Our son tried to transfer after his first year to the University of Texas where he was initially accepted, but they wanted him to do summer school first. The timing didn’t work out, and it became obvious that God had other plans. He was going back to Babson.

Long story short: in the fall of 2005, I received a phone call. Jimmy said he went to church. When I asked him where, he said, a church started on the college campus IN THE CHAPEL. When he told me it was a Christian church that believed in the Bible, I was absolutely thrilled!

Never, in my wildest dreams, did I think that a church (a CHRISTIAN church, no less) would be right on the college campus where students could just roll out of bed and be ministered to by the Lord and the community.

The vision of this church is to be a local supportive community of authentic followers of Christ who experience transformation by the grace of Jesus Christ and bring God’s love to the world. It was through their ministry that Jimmy’s attitude changed regarding being at Babson. He met fellow students who were believers – one to this day who is his best friend. He found solace and comfort in meeting Christians from the community. Being invited to meals, dinners, and functions by the members of this church boosted his faith and that of those who attended with him. He played his guitar during the church services.

Finally, after a year of zealous praying, my son and others had a spiritual community of believers that cared for them, guided them, fed them, and loved them for the next three years.

I asked Jimmy (who has been out of that scenario for 6 1/2 years) what his involvement with the church meant to him and his buddies. He said, in his business tone, “It was an excellent way for the campus students to mature in their spiritual life; to see how ‘older’ Christians lived their lives; and to see how Christian employers and businessmen act and conduct business.”

Then, the goose bumps came when I heard what God had been doing behind the scenes the entire first year I was praying. One of the founding members of the church shared with me about how their home-church contacted the chaplain at Babson to ask about the availability of their church meeting in the chapel for services. Much to their amazement, they were told that the only time the chapel was available was on Sunday morning.

What a blessing to see how the Holy Spirit was working things all together as only He can do. Only God can take the prayers of one mom in Texas and one congregation in Massachusetts to work things together for good. There was no doubt in my mind that God started the ministry on the Babson campus and there was no doubt why. He always knows the big picture and puts it all together for His glory.

College is hard enough. Having an outlet for fellowship, love, and good Bible-teaching is a true blessing and outreach. You may not ever know how much it means to these kids, but believe me, it does. I continue to see the spiritual fruits of this Christian community in Jimmy’s life. God knew his unmet spiritual needs and He chose to meet it through this church.

The fall after my son graduated from Babson, the church relocated from the college chapel to a different facility. While I was happy for the church when they moved to a new location, a part of my heart was saddened by the lack of spiritual needs that might go unmet with those college students. But, fortunately, their new location was close to the college campus!

All I can say to this wonderful church is “thank you from the bottom of my heart for being receptive to the Holy Spirit and heeding His call.” While I was praying for a local church, God was creating a “ROLL OUT OF BED CHURCH” for all those Babson students who attended. God answered above all expectations. He even knew that my son would thrive best when church was within a five-minute wake-up time to sitting in a pew.

Praying ‘community’ into existence is powerful. Not only was I impressed by the need for believers to dwell in union and in community in Jesus Christ, I experienced firsthand how prayer can spur Christian community into existence.

Bible Verses:

Do not be anxious about anything, but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God. (Philippians 4:6).

And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds, not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching (Hebrews 10:24-25).

Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ (Galatians 6:2).

And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose (Romans 8:28).

Prayer:

Dear Father, Thank you for being with me during the difficult and painful times of my life. With your love and power, you can change circumstances and situations. You are an awesome God. May I always trust you to know best. Help me to always realize that through our tough times we grow more in faith and love towards you. Thanks you again. I love you. In Jesus’ Name. Amen.

God Bless,

PATTIGREENE.eps-(1

Patti Greene, Member Inspirational Writers Alive

Testimony given with permission from Jimmy.

Houdmann, S. Michael. Got Questions. GotQuestions.org. Accessed 27 Oct 2016.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version containing the Old and New Testament. Wheaton: Crossway, 2001. [All verses come from the English Standard Bible unless noted otherwise]

Edited by E. Johnson

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