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5 Powerful Church Trends to Watch for This Year

4. Intimacy within the crowd.

We are quickly becoming an urban society. Big cities are getting bigger. Big churches are getting bigger.

People are leaving the countryside in favor of the concrete jungle. The gravitational pull of large cities and large churches will continue for a generation, at least.

But the draw of the city and the large church does not mean people eschew intimacy. In fact, the crowds of megacities and megachurches mean people are more intentional about trying to find intimacy.

Healthy churches will get bigger by getting smaller. In this era of urbanization, small group settings are arguably more important now than at any point in our history.

Quite simply, you will not keep people in a large worship service for long without also connecting them to a small group.

5. Weariness of overwhelming amounts of information.

Hyperlinks, RSS feeds and Twitter—they are all great until you get overwhelmed. Access to information is no longer a problem. Everyone is talking, and it’s posted all over the Internet hinterland.

Now people just want to know who to listen to. In the overwhelming, loud complexity of our culture, the church should be a solace of simplicity and clarity.

Of course, most church leaders try to make their church simple for them. Making a church simple for the people, however, is tremendously difficult and entirely complex for the leadership.

As church leaders, we’ve made simple about us. It’s time we make church simple for the people.

Projecting the cultural climate 10 years out is about as exact as nailing the 10th day in a 10-day forecast. But there is great value in assessing your assumptions about the direction of the culture, especially within the next year or two.

Our culture is constantly changing. What people think about organizations is changing. As a leader, you must become a student of the culture to recognize these changes, and you must be flexible enough to rework your assumptions when necessary.