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The day of one-size-fits-all worship is apparently a thing of the past -- if it ever existed. The watchword for worship in the new millennium is “diversify.”

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Thousands of churches across the country are adding worship services to reach different groups of people. Traditional churches are starting services for baby boomers. Boomer churches are reaching out to GenXers. Some churches are even targeting the fastest-growing subculture -- senior adults.

The trend knows few bounds. From the struggling traditional church in the city center to the thriving megachurch that reigns in the suburbs, multiple worship services is becoming the solution of choice for churches looking to reach new people or avoid decline.

“That’s happening all over the country in tens of thousands of churches,” says church consultant Bob Gilliam of Aurora, Colo.

Charles Arn, a church-growth researcher from Monrovia, Calif., estimates that half of the country’s 355,000 Protestant churches would benefit from starting a new worship service, either to reach a new group of people or to bring in more of the same. According to Arn and others, new worship services grow faster than existing congregations. For three-fourths of American churches -- which researchers say are either not growing or in decline -- adding worship for a new target audience is one way to breathe new life into old forms.

The formula varies widely. Some churches offer new styles and formats for worship. Some offer more convenient times. Some target different subcultures -- from punks to cowboys. The most common pattern for multiple services, Arn says, is “from one generation to its succeeding generation,” which also usually includes a more contemporary worship style.

The result of all this diversification is another very American addition to the religious lexicon -- “multicongregational churches” -- where two or more distinct groups live together as one local church.
But does it work? And is it healthy? Is diversity of worship the answer for every church or only some? And what holds a church together when it meets in separate services?

“Those are going to be hot debates for the next 10 to 20 years,” predicts David Hughes, a pastor who studied the trend and led a traditional church to make the transition.

Tribes Within a Tribe

The idea of “a church within a church,” as some call it, is not entirely new. In reality, any church with more than 100 or so members is a collection of subgroups, “a federation of tribes within a tribe,” says Hughes, pastor of First Baptist Church of Winston-Salem, N.C. Sunday school classes, age groups or ministry teams each can function as a subgroup.

But when those subgroups meet separately for worship -- the one activity they used to do all at once under one roof -- subtle distinctions become pronounced ones.
Worshiping in subgroups became popular in the 1980s. It followed a national trend toward demographic segmenting and target marketing, “which probably began when the baby boom generation arrived on the scene,” notes Arn, president of Church Growth Inc.

For many congregations, the story is strikingly similar. Baby boomers did not respond well to traditional church methods and programs, but they flocked to churches that made worship and other ministries relevant to the boomer subculture. New churches designed with boomers in mind flourished, while those founded earlier by the builder generation struggled to keep up.

While some traditional churches tried to adapt, others resisted major changes, particularly to their style of worship. The rock-based worship music of the boomers was too much of a departure from the tradition of organ and hymn. Yet as many builder churches stopped growing, the prospect of missing a whole generation of Christians spurred some to action. The solution for many was segmented worship along generational lines. A second worship service.

First Baptist of Winston-Salem is a historic downtown church with a formal worship style. In 1991, David Hughes led the 1,200-member church to start an early-morning contemporary service for the baby boomers who were not responding to the church’s traditional ministry. Though only a fourth the size of the traditional congregation, the new service accounts for most of the church’s growth.

Meanwhile, some boomer churches, after a decade or more of growth, found their appeal to the baby bust generation likewise was limited. The cultural gap between boomers and busters was in some ways even wider. So beginning in the late 1980s, subcongregations for the post-1964 generation began to appear.

Willow Creek Community Church in suburban Chicago, the quintessential baby boomer church, established a new service for baby busters when it became clear they weren’t attracted to Willow’s patented seeker services. Dieter Zander, who in 1986 founded one of the country’s first buster churches in West Covina, Calif., was hired in 1994 as the teaching pastor for Willow’s new congregation.

Facing Outward

Charles Arn says segmented worship is the best strategy for reaching any new group of people. After studying the experience of several hundred churches over a five-year period, he found that 80 percent of churches that add a new worship service show an increase in total attendance, contributions and conversions.

But multiple worship services don’t work for every church. What makes the difference?
The one essential ingredient, according to pastors and consultants alike, is an outward focus. Churches that are committed to those outside their fellowship can muster the resources and tolerate the changes required to make multiple worship work.

That commitment is called different things -- a growth orientation, evangelistic fervor, Great Commission thinking. A growing league of scholars and researchers refer to an “apostolic mindset,” recalling the outward focus of the first-century apostles that spread the gospel throughout the Mediterranean.

“An apostolic mindset is absolutely essential,” says Jim Johnson, who has led Dunwoody Baptist Church in Atlanta through a transition from a traditional church to one targeting boomers and busters. “The average lifespan for a church is 50 years, after which it follows a bell curve and begins to decline. For a church to survive and thrive after that, it has to make arrangements to reach a succeeding generational group or succeeding mindset.”

A church focused on preserving the past, protecting its fellowship, or simply surviving won’t have the commitment to start multiple worship services, says Arn, author of How to Start a New Service. His studies suggest half the Protestant churches in the country fall into that category.

“For a church that does not have a Great Commission conscience, there really is little or no alternative other than stagnation and death because that, more than any other ingredient, is necessary for a church to grow,” he says.

Arn worries about what he calls a “spiritual selfishness” that keeps many churches from focusing outward. “There is a plague of self-centeredness which spends far more time than appropriate on our own spiritual growth and far less than appropriate … on reaching beyond ourselves.”

Three Models

Not all multicongregational churches look alike. Several distinct models are emerging.

• Different services. Two congregations meet separately for worship but are led by the same pastor. This is the most common pattern is for multicongregational churches. But not all pastors and music directors can minister effectively within two generations or two styles.

  
  

• Different congregations. Two congregations share facilities but not the same staff. Each congregation is led by a pastor who identifies with the target group. The older congregation usually is led by the senior pastor. But success can bring problems. What happens when the newer congregation becomes the strongest? Few churches have thought about generational succession.
  
• Different churches. One congregation “plants” another one to target a different group. But the new congregation eventually stands on its own, much like the mission-church model used effectively in the past. This approach is not as popular right now, since is does nothing to guarantee the future of the mother church. But that may change.
  

Dieter Zander left Willow Creek last year and now works for Bay Marin Community Church planting churches in nearby San Francisco. His departure was sparked by differences over how the baby buster congregation fit into the larger church body, he says. “We all said we wanted to do something to reach the next generation … but we weren’t really saying the same thing.” Pastor Bill Hybels expected the new congregation eventually to “fold into the main ministry of the church,” Zander explains.

But baby busters will never worship and think like boomers, say Zander and others, because the differences are more than generational.

“There is something more at stake here than a generational shift,” says Brad Cecil, who leads the buster congregation at Pantego Bible Church in Arlington, Texas. Baby busters, or GenXers, are the first generation raised with a postmodern worldview, which means they experience and process truth differently than boomers and builders, most of whom have a modernist mindset.

Don’t expect busters to be assimilated into boomer or builder congregations, Cecil says. “I don’t think conversion to modernity is what’s going to happen.”

Zander and Cecil do believe a true church within a church -- separate ministers serving distinct congregations -- can work for churches that want to reach busters. “It works if the senior minister embraces the concept,” Zander adds.

He says he has no hard feelings about Willow Creek. “They are consistent with who they feel God wants them to be.” But his experience emphasized the need for clear direction and understanding for any church beginning multiple worship services. “Where is this going ultimately? We did not fully answer that at Willow.”

Finding Community

For a multicongregational church to work, the groups have to have the same doctrine and philosophy of ministry, says Bob Gilliam, who directs the Center for Church Effectiveness. And the groups have to believe “we are working together to accomplish something we both believe in.”
Even with those shared values, problems are inevitable.

“The first and most predictable response you will hear,” says researcher Charles Arn, “is ‘we won’t know everyone anymore’ or ‘we will become two churches.’” The reality, he says, is that two groups worshiping separately are much like two churches.

There is something lost when a church is divided for worship. “What we are losing is fellowship,” says Gilliam. “But fellowship is something that can only be maintained with 70 to 90 people at a time.”

Jim Johnson preaches for both the traditional and contemporary services at Dunwoody Baptist and, yes, he feels like he is pastor of two churches. But he notes: “Large congregations have multiple congregations anyway. We now just have multiple worshiping congregations.”

The idea that a church is unified by worshiping together under one roof is misleading, says David Hughes. “I hope we all know that is a very inadequate definition of unity. There is more than that to being unified as the body of Christ.”

What most churches have had all along are “familiar strangers,” he says. “They move in and out, but do they really know each other?”

“What we’ve all got to do is be very intentional about building community in the midst of diversity, to build as many bridges as we can among the disparate parts of the church,” Hughes says. Common ground, he adds, can be established around coffee pots, through joint worship services and intergenerational seminars. “Start with the willing.”

Worship is not the time to build community anyway, the pastors and consultants agreed.
“I don’t believe the primary purpose of worship is community with each other but to commune with God,” says Arn.

Tough choices

By far the biggest obstacle a church faces in moving to multiple services is resistance to change.
With the larger culture changing so rapidly, “people are looking for little oases of non-change,” says Hughes.

But that can be a death sentence for churches in the future, says Gilliam. “An average of 12 to 15 churches close their doors every day,” he says, in part because they can’t attract younger members. “If they are unwilling to change, they will not reach out to this constituency.”

Many churches that want to be “multigenerational” still are geared to reach only one generation, says Hughes. “If you are serious about having boomers and busters, you have to at least be generationally sensitive. Otherwise you are going to be bypassed.”

But it’s hard for a church to face such harsh realities.
“It sounds a little like saying … ‘We don’t want to change, but we don’t want to die,’” notes Dieter Zander. “But it is usually out of pain that a church changes. People don’t change when things are going well.”

Of course, multiple worship services is not the only way to adapt. Many churches are unwilling to pay the price of segmented worship -- loss of fellowship, generational segregation, added workload.
Some of them are finding “blended worship” a better solution. The chief advocate is Robert Webber of Wheaton University, who teaches a workshop on blending the classic church traditions with the best elements of contemporary worship.

Some churches are so deeply committed to their style of worship that blending is not an option. Others find blended worship unsatisfying. “No one church service can be everything to everyone,” says Arn. “Those that try end up being very little to anyone.”

All change is hard, and it’s not just churches that feel the intense pressure to adjust, Hughes says. “Inflexible institutions of all kinds are on the endangered species list.”
Churches facing the future may find themselves subject to a kind of “spiritual Darwinism,” he adds.
“It may be the survival of the flexible.”

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Reprinted with permission from Faith Works. FaithWorks is a bimonthly print and electronic magazine for contemporary Christians that seeks to engage Christians in dialogue with their world and empower them to integrate faith and life. Subscribe by calling 888-715-9403.

Greg Warner is the Executive Editor of Faith Works.