Part 2 of a series, “Five disruptive church trends in 2025”

April 3, 2025

By Rev. Rick King

Carey Nieuwhof is the Canadian pastor and trend-spotter I read who annually publishes a list of “disruptive church trends” that he believes will affect churches of all types, even though he writes with a primarily evangelical audience in mind. I’m interested in how we can view this year’s five disruptive trends through the lens of our merger process. Each week, we’ll look at a different trend and see how it applies to us as we try to plant a new church out of a merger of two existing churches facing challenges. Source of the content is Nieuwhof’s blog, but the take on it is my own.

We progressive Protestants, the formerly mainline denominations like the UCC and the Presbyterian Church (USA), have this idea that evangelical churches haven’t experienced the precipitous decline our churches did in the 20th century.

All around us in Minnesota, we see large ELCA and megachurches and think they’re growing because they emphasize outreach to unchurched people. But in the last few years, observers of evangelical churches like Carey Nieuwhof are alarmed at the disappearance of evangelism from evangelical churches, too.

The Barna Group has been surveying church life on the evangelical side for decades, and between 2015 and 2023 the number of pastors who said their church was very effective at outreach to non-churchgoers dropped from 13 percent to 1 percent. And overall, 99 percent said that their church is “not very effective” at outreach.

Church surveys use “transfer growth” and “conversion growth” to distinguish between church growth through people switching membership from one church to another vs. growth through people with no affiliation coming to faith and joining the church.

There are a number of ways to assess how this is happening in churches, but one measure is the number of people who join a church by baptism or reaffirmation of faith (both categories the UCC uses in its annual denominational yearbook reporting). Even among Southern Baptists, more than three-quarters of the churches had zero to five conversions and baptisms in the prior calendar year.

And according to one source, even churches listed as the fastest growing or largest churches are growing because people are transferring their membership from smaller churches to these larger ones, part of a church consolidation trend of the past five years.

But if God’s love compels us to reach out to those who have yet to experience the grace of a loving God, and to serve the poor, side with the vulnerable and voiceless, and work for change in the world—shouldn’t THAT be one of the defining characteristics of the new church-plant that comes out of this merger with New Life Presbyterian?

And the reason for doing this cannot be the survival of our churches. If the motivation for reaching out to unchurched people is to prop up a declining church, unchurched people will smell that a mile away. No, it has to be because we come to believe God is for people who are not like us, as well as people like us.

And for us to come to believe that, we need contact with the many people around our churches who can tell us about the needs and the assets in the neighborhoods—points of intersection and collaboration to address, loneliness, poverty, violence, and so many other problems that are many times hidden, but exist among us nonetheless.

Interested in what UCC folks suggest for evangelism and outreach from churches just like us? Check out this list https://www.sneucc.org/postdetail/the-do-s-and-don-ts-of-evangelism-18659279 of Evangelism Do’s and Don’ts published by the Southern New England Conference of the UCC last fall.

Which ones do YOU resonate with? Which seem to be low-hanging fruit for our church and for New Life Presbyterian?