| THE PHILIPPINE CHURCH • REPORT
Eating Our Own
by Mark Timothy Brion
Thirty Filipino pastors have spent between two and four decades building small churches and watching their people leave for larger ones. Forty of the fifty megachurch attendees I interviewed came from another congregation. Their reasons deserve a hearing.
THE PASTOR ACROSS THE TABLE had been in the same barangay for twenty-two years. He could name every family in his congregation, and he could name the ones who had gone. Not fallen away—gone. To a larger church in the city, forty minutes by jeepney, with a full band and a children's ministry and air conditioning.
He was not bitter. It took me most of that afternoon to work out that this was not the same as being at peace. He said something close to this: I understand why they left. If I were them, I might have left too.
Over the past two years I interviewed thirty pastors of Philippine congregations between fifty and two hundred members across Metro Manila and the provinces around it — Laguna, Bulacan, Rizal, Cavite. Every one of them has been pastoring for at least two decades. Several are approaching four. Then I went to the other side and interviewed fifty attendees at five large urban congregations about how they got there. What I found was not a scandal. It was something harder to talk about: a movement redistributing itself without ceremony, and almost nobody measuring the transfer.
HOW THIS WAS REPORTED
Thirty pastors of congregations between 50 and 200 members in Metro Manila, Laguna, Bulacan, Rizal and Cavite, interviewed over a two-year period ending [month, year]. Years in pastoral ministry ranged from 21 to 38, with a median of 26. Separately, 50 attendees at five large urban congregations were interviewed about their church history and their reasons for attending where they now attend; 40 of the 50 had transferred from another congregation.
This is field reporting, not a statistically representative survey. The sample was not randomised and the findings should be read as testimony rather than as national data. Where national figures are cited, they are attributed.
WHAT THE THIRTY PASTORS SAID
The pattern was consistent enough to be predictable by the fifth interview.
A church reaches sixty or eighty. It stabilises. A family that has been there for years—often one of the tithing families, often one of the few with a car—begins attending a larger church "occasionally." Then the children go, because the youth ministry there has thirty teenagers instead of four. Then the family goes. There is no conflict, no letter, no conversation. The seats are simply empty one Sunday, and stay empty.
Several of the pastors described losing not just givers but their entire second tier of leadership—the worship leader, the Sunday school teacher, the man who could preach when the pastor was sick. One put it in terms of arithmetic: he had raised up the same kind of leader four separate times over eighteen years, and four separate times that leader had graduated to a bigger church.
None of the thirty had ever received a call from the receiving church. Not one.
Every one of the thirty said a version of the same sentence: at least they are still in a church, at least they are still worshipping somewhere. I believe they meant it. I also watched them say it. There is a particular way a man holds his face when he is defending the people who walked away from him, and I saw it thirty times. One pastor finished the sentence, stopped, and looked out the window for a while before he picked it up again.
They are not bitter. They are grieving. Those are not the same thing, and this movement has been treating the first as though it were the only possibility.
Most of them are bivocational. Most of them are also, by any honest measure, doing frontline mission work—present in a community where no large church has any intention of going.
Twenty years of work. Four generations of leaders raised. None of them still in the room.
EIGHT IN TEN
Then I went to the large churches and asked a simple question: before this church, where did you worship?
Forty out of fifty had come from another congregation. Eight in ten. That number surprised me, and I want to be careful with it—it is what the people in front of me said, not a national statistic. But it is close enough to the international research that I do not think it is an accident.
What they gave as reasons is the part worth sitting with, because almost none of it was frivolous.
The most common answer, by a distance, was that the programs were better. The second was that there was a clear direction for spiritual growth—a stated pathway from new believer to small-group member to leader, with someone responsible for moving them along it. Several described it as the first time anyone had told them what the next step was.
After that came the reasons that are easier to dismiss and should not be. Coziness. Convenience—parking, service times, a building that does not flood. Music that sounds like the music they listen to during the week. And yes, in a number of cases, a specific well-known pastor whose preaching they had first encountered online.
Three said they had left after a conflict nobody resolved. Two said they had simply moved house. One said he had never been asked to do anything in twelve years at his previous church, and at the new one he was serving within a month.
WHAT THE WIDER RESEARCH SHOWS
The Philippines has no national study of transfer growth. The United States does, and the figures line up uncomfortably well with what I heard.
The Hartford Institute for Religion Research and Leadership Network surveyed megachurch attendees directly rather than asking pastors to estimate. Forty-four percent had transferred from another local church and twenty-eight percent from a church elsewhere. Eighteen percent had been away from church for a period, six percent were unchurched, and four percent were children raised in the congregation. Roughly seven in ten arrived already belonging somewhere.
A LifeWay Research survey of Protestant pastors found forty-nine percent of new attendees over a five-year period had transferred. Church consultants Gary McIntosh and Thom Rainer have documented that fewer than five percent of congregations grow primarily through conversion, and that the average congregation records roughly one profession of faith per eighty-five attenders per year.
Set that beside the Philippine mission picture. Of roughly forty-two thousand barangays, researchers with Philippine Challenge estimate about twenty-three thousand still have no evangelical church, covering something near thirty million people. The movement is consolidating its attendance in cities while half the country's smallest communities remain without a congregation.
WHERE MEGACHURCH ATTENDEES CAME FROM
Transferred from another local church
44%
Transferred from a church elsewhere
28%
Had been away from church
18%
Unchurched before attending
6%
Raised in the congregation
4%
Hartford Institute for Religion Research / Leadership Network, attendee survey. US data; no Philippine equivalent exists.
THE UNCOMFORTABLE FINDING
Here is where a piece like this usually turns into an attack on large churches, and where it should not.
Almost every reason the transferees gave was a legitimate complaint about the church they left. Better programs is a complaint about preparation. Clear direction for spiritual growth is a complaint about the absence of any pathway at all—and a pathway costs nothing but thought. Coziness is a complaint about welcome. Being given something to do within a month is a complaint about twelve years of being unused.
Of these, only one is a budget problem. The rest are attention problems, and a church of eighty can solve them faster than a church of eight thousand.
The large churches in this country did not steal anybody. In most cases they were simply the first congregation that told a believer what the next step in his life with Christ was supposed to be. That is not predation. That is the small church losing a competition it did not know it was in—and, more to the point, a competition that should never have been the frame in the first place.
What is fair to press on the large church is different: the receiving. A congregation that gains a hundred families a year and never asks one of them where they came from, never contacts the church they left, and never sends anyone back to reconcile a conflict, has decided that growth is its own justification. That is a stewardship failure, and it is the one the New Testament actually addresses.
WHAT SCRIPTURE SAYS ABOUT THIS
But if you bite and devour one another, watch out that you are not consumed by one another.
GALATIANS 5:15
Paul is writing to churches, about churches. The danger he names is not persecution from outside but a body consuming itself.
Four further lines of teaching bear directly on this.
The body cannot dismiss its own parts. The eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you, and the parts that seem weaker are indispensable (1 Corinthians 12:21–22). A large congregation that regards small churches as feeder stock has inverted the text.
Attachment to a preacher is an old error, and Paul treated it as a sign of immaturity. One says I follow Paul, another I follow Apollos—and Paul's response is to ask whether Christ has been divided (1 Corinthians 1:12–13). The celebrity pastor is not a new temptation. It is the Corinthian one with a livestream.
Shepherds are judged by whether the sheep were fed and sought. Ezekiel condemns shepherds who feed themselves while the flock is scattered over the whole earth with none to search for them (Ezekiel 34:2–6). The charge falls on any pastor, of any size church, who is willing to receive sheep but not to go looking for them.
The one is worth leaving the ninety-nine for. Jesus's shepherd goes after a single lost sheep (Luke 15:4). The arithmetic of that parable runs against consolidation in every direction.
WHAT WE CAN LEARN
A PATHWAY IS NOT A BUDGET ITEM. The single most cited reason for leaving was that the larger church made the next step clear. Any congregation of fifty can define a pathway—believe, be baptised, join a group, serve, lead—and name a person responsible for each step. Most do not have one written down anywhere.
UNUSED PEOPLE LEAVE. Twelve years without an assignment is not membership; it is attendance. Give people work within ninety days or expect to lose them to a church that will.
RECEIVING CHURCHES SHOULD MAKE THE CALL. When a family transfers, ask where they came from and why, and contact the previous pastor. If they left over unresolved conflict, send them back to resolve it before enrolling them. This single practice would change the ethics of Philippine church growth more than any conference.
COUNT CONVERSIONS, NOT ATTENDANCE. A church that grew by two hundred and baptised four first-time believers did not grow. It absorbed. Publish both numbers internally and the culture corrects itself within a year.
LARGE CHURCHES SHOULD PLANT WHERE NOBODY WANTS TO GO. Twenty-three thousand barangays have no evangelical church. A congregation of five thousand that funds fifty planters has done the work of fifty churches. One that funds none is a terminus.
SMALL CHURCHES ARE FRONTLINE MISSIONS STATIONS, AND SHOULD BE FUNDED AS SUCH. A bivocational pastor in a barangay of two thousand, twenty-five years in, is doing exactly what the movement says it wants done. He is also usually funded worse than anyone in the movement. That is not a scarcity problem; it is a routing problem—and it is fixable through deliberate ministry partnership, not by waiting for a struggling congregation's offering to grow.
A LAST WORD TO THE THIRTY
The pastor with twenty-two years in one barangay was not wrong to understand why his people left. He was wrong about one thing only—that the story was over.
The people who transferred are not lost. They are in a church. The question the movement has to answer is not how to get them back. It is why we built a system in which twenty years of faithful work in a hard place ends with an empty room and no phone call—and what the larger churches, who now have the people and the resources, intend to do about the twenty-three thousand barangays that will never produce a crowd worth transferring to.
SOURCES
Field interviews conducted by the author over two years ending [month, year] in Metro Manila, Laguna, Bulacan, Rizal and Cavite. Sample not randomised; findings reported as testimony.
Transfer and conversion growth: Scott Thumma, Dave Travis and Warren Bird, Not Who You Think They Are: A Profile of the People Who Attend America's Megachurches (Hartford Institute for Religion Research / Leadership Network, 2009); LifeWay Research, 2009 pastor survey; Gary McIntosh and Thom Rainer, cited in Outreach Magazine; Church Answers research on transfer growth.
Philippine church planting and barangay figures: Philippine Challenge (philchal.org); OMF International, Philippines field profile; Operation World, Philippines entry.
Scripture quotations are from the ESV.
Eating Our Own
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Forty of the fifty megachurch attendees
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Eating Our Own
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