We welcome everyone! Those three words dominate the sign in front of a small brick church building on a residential street. Most of the residents of this neighborhood are housed in single-family homes constructed in the 1920s. Four out of five are in good repair. Scattered here and there are perhaps a dozen two-flat structures. One of them is occupied by a family who lives on the second floor and has converted the first floor into a small grocery store. About half of the houses are occupied by third or fourth generation Americans and the other half by recent immigrants from the Pacific Rim.

Below those top three words on that sign is the name of this congregation followed by the Sunday morning schedule, the name of the pastor, and, in the bottom right on the sign, "Founded 1925." A brief visit reveals the pastor is a 69-year-old semi-retired minister who arrived three years earlier and is determined to transform this all-Anglo congregation into a multicultural congregation of neighborhood residents. He estimated that about two-thirds of the 55-to-60 worshipers on the typical Sunday morning are ex-residents who were born and reared in this neighborhood, but have moved into newer housing to the west in recent years. The congregation owns 17 off-street parking spaces, and another dozen for street parking are nearby.

Five blocks to the east in this same neighborhood is another church building. It was constructed by Methodists in 1923, sold to an independent Baptist congregation in 1977, who then sold it to a Hmong congregation in 1981. The bilingual pastor explained nearly all the adult members came to the United States after the Vietnam War, and about one-fifth live within two miles of the building, but it is one of only two Hmong congregations in the entire metropolitan area.

A couple of miles to the west is another Protestant congregation also meeting in a secondhand church building. A white Lutheran parish outgrew the property and, in 2003, sold this 23-year-old building on a three-acre site to a new independent congregation pastored by an American-born black pastor who explained, "Back in 2001, I concluded God was calling me to fill a vacuum after nine years as the pastor of an African-American church. I have a white wife. We have three children, who are now 8, 11, and 14. All three have been and are being teased in school because, as children of a bicultural marriage, they are different. The older two found this to be a real problem. As you know, the number of bicultural marriages has been increasing in recent years. The estimates are that somewhere between 3 to 5 percent of all first marriages this year will be bicultural couples such as Asian-Anglo, black-white, Hispanic-Asian, Hispanic-Anglo, and others.

"As my wife and I struggled with this," continued this visionary pastor, "we concluded our children needed an environment where the bicultural family is the norm, not the exception. When we explained this to our elders, they not only endorsed our decision, they also gave me a three-month terminal leave with full salary and other compensation to organize this new congregation. I spent six weeks in late 2001 gathering the names of couples in a bicultural marriage and enlisted two dozen families to help pioneer this new church. We leased a vacant store in a strip shopping center for our first meeting place. Next we hired a professional to make a 30-minute videotape that showed where we would meet and explained our mission. We mailed a letter to every couple we had identified and gave them our e-mail address as well as our telephone number and invited them to ask for a copy of the videotape. Three weeks before my terminal leave expired, we had our first public worship service. The attendance that first Sunday morning included 143 adults and 75 children. Eighteen months later, in mid-2003, this building became available, and we purchased it. The reason our Sunday morning worship attendance now averages well over 300 is we are the only church in this metropolitan area designed to serve families in bicultural marriages."

(Note. The U. S. Bureau of the Census recently reported nearly 3 million couples in America are in bicultural marriages.)

Three Basic Generalizations
These three congregations illustrate several facets of the religious landscape in 21st century American Christianity. The first, and perhaps the most significant, is the arrival of younger generations who place a high value on the right of individual choice. As a group, Americans born after 1960 believe they have a right to make the decisions that will shape their future. Their grandparents, and, in many cases, their parents, inherited their institutional loyalties. That included inheriting a loyalty to a specific religious body, to a political party, to a department store, and to the choice of a spouse. The American-born children of German immigrants tended to marry a person of their own ancestry, as did the Norwegians, Italians, Swedish, Japanese, Koreans, and, more recently, the Mexicans.

Catholics married Catholics, and their children raised their offspring to be Catholics. That was the practice of American Catholics born before World War II. A new book, American Catholics Today, by William V. D'Antonio documents the impact of individualism. When presented with the statement, "Being Catholic is a very important part of who I am," 91 percent of those born before 1941 responded, "Yes" as did 44 percent of those born 1941-1977, but only 19 percent of a sample of 1,600 students enrolled in Catholic colleges in 2004. The rate of Mass attendance dropped from 60 percent for the pre-1941 generation to 15 percent for the college students.

These and similar research reports not only document the growth of individualism, but also explain why at least 10 million Americans who were baptized into the Roman Catholic Church as children are now worshiping with a Protestant congregation and an estimated second 10 million have dropped out of church completely. This spread of individualism introduces a second generalization. The competition among the Christian churches in America for future constituents is at an all-time high.

If we shift the focus from denominations to congregations, which congregations are reporting an increase in the number of active constituents? One or more of these words describes most of the "winners" in this competition.

1. Passion. The leadership is driven by a passion for evangelism.

2. New. They have been worshiping at the same address for fewer than three decades. The focus is on creating the new, not on perpetuating the old.

3. Relevance. "The ministries here speak to me where I am at on my personal and/or faith journey."

4. Quality. A high value is placed on quality. That applies to everything from preaching to parking, from equipping believers to be engaged in doing ministry to transforming inquirers into fully devoted disciples of Jesus Christ.

5. Choices. Attractive and meaningful choices are offered in worship, in learning, in meeting and making new friends, in doing ministry, and in one's personal and spiritual growth.

6. Niche. "The reason I came back a second time and I'm still here is this place is filled with people like me."

Factors 2, 3, and 6 explain the rapid growth of this new congregation created for bicultural families as well as the existence of that Hmong church.

Those two generalizations—the emergence of individualism and the rise in the level of competition—introduce the third. In this environment, no one congregation can mobilize the resources required to both welcome and provide high-quality ministries to everyone. No one congregation can schedule the corporate worship of God in three or four dozen different languages every weekend. Slogans may make the members feel good, but identifying and focusing on a precisely defined slice of the American population is a more effective strategy for reaching more people than is the slogan, "We welcome everyone."

What Are Your Choices?
A variety of research reports and surveys of congregational life in contemporary American Protestantism suggest that at least 80 percent of all congregations either are experiencing numerical decline or are on a plateau in size.

For some congregational leaders, the most attractive option is to blame the culture in general and younger generations in particular for the aging of their constituency.

A more constructive response begins by recognizing that what worked in the 1950s may not be the most effective way to "do church" in the 21st century. A common second step in the process today is to identify the relevant characteristics of the people "we seek to reach and serve." The leaders in thousands of small congregations have decided to focus on adults "who are looking for a friendly congregation where the people know and care for one another."

One-half of all the Protestant congregations in America report their average worship attendance is under 70—the maximum size to be a caring fellowship, but together they account for an estimated 20 percent of all Protestant churchgoers on the typical weekend. Those two numbers suggest this niche may be one of the most competitive of all options.

One of the most popular choices in American Protestantism for well over three centuries was to focus on "serving the people who live within walking distance of our meeting place." This option continued to be widely used in planting new missions as recently as the 1960s, but the widespread ownership of the private motor vehicle has made it obsolete. Up through the 1940s, a widely used option was to focus on people "who moved here from where we used to live." That could include newcomers from Sweden or Mississippi or Germany or Iowa or Italy or Alabama or Scotland or Kentucky. Today that model continues to be useful in reaching recent immigrants from Korea, China, Cuba, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Japan, and a dozen other countries.

Another example of a niche operates with the invitation, "We're here to help you rear your children." That ministry may include at least one worship experience designed for parents of young children, Sunday school classes for all ages, a weekday Christian preschool for children ages 3 to 5, a once-a-week Mothers' Day Out, a full range of parenting classes, two or more mutual support groups for single parent mothers, a series of learning experiences over several weeks for parents in a newly blended family, and a preparatory equipping program for adults planning to adopt a child.

What's the Point?
We could spend another 25,000 words describing a variety of other niches, roles, identities, and specialized ministries being fulfilled by congregations all across the country. In some of these, the informal grapevine carries the message from members to friends, neighbors, relatives, and colleagues at work that, "My church is the one where you will find what you seek." One example is the congregation that organizes a new adult Sunday school every September for "newlyweds and engaged couples who want to build a healthy, happy, and enduring marriage." Another is the megachurch in which four out of five of the newcomers are disenchanted "Cradle Catholics" looking for a new church home. A third that is fed by the grapevine is for the couple in a marriage that united a Catholic and Protestant.

Whether you depend on a slogan on the bulletin board or on the grapevine or a newspaper advertisement to bring new people to your church, the advice is the same. Be sure your self-described identity or role or niche or distinctive ministry is consistent with what you offer. The response you seek from every visiting church shopper is, "This is the church I've been trying to find!" The response you do not want is, "Well, guess I'll have to keep on looking."

The rising level of competition among the churches for future constituents is the theme of the author's latest book, From Cooperation to Competition, Abingdon Press, 2006.

Copyright © 2007 Lyle Schaller