The Call to Action and the "drivers of vitality": what a 2010 church study found, and its limits

Notebook · Published 2026-10-21

In 2010 The United Methodist Church tried to answer, with data, a question every congregation asks: what makes some churches vital and others not? The resulting study, part of a denomination-wide process called the Call to Action, became one of the most cited pieces of research in mainline church leadership for a decade. Its findings are still useful, provided they are read for what they are.

Background

By the late 2000s, membership and attendance in the denomination's U.S. churches had been declining for decades, while its churches in Africa and Asia were growing. In 2009 the Council of Bishops and the Connectional Table set up a Call to Action Steering Team to recommend changes. The team was formed in January 2010 and released its final report on 25 October 2010. Its central recommendation was blunt: the denomination's first priority must be fostering and sustaining the vitality of congregations, and its structures, budgets and leadership should be redirected toward that end.

To ground the recommendation, the steering team commissioned the consulting firm Towers Watson to analyze data from more than 32,000 United Methodist congregations in the United States, drawing on years of statistical reports. A second consultant reviewed the denomination's operations and governance.

How "vitality" was defined

The researchers built an index of congregational vitality from reported statistics, combining measures of attendance growth, engagement and giving relative to the size of the congregation. The analysts then looked for the characteristics most often found in churches with high vitality scores. That design shapes everything that follows: vitality here means what can be derived from annual reports, not a direct measure of spiritual depth or community impact.

The four clusters of drivers

The study grouped the factors associated with vitality into four areas.

Small groups and programs. Vital churches tended to have more small groups and more programs for children and youth. Reporting at the time noted that 60 percent of churches with more than five small groups were highly vital, against 19 percent of those with three or fewer.
Lay leadership. Vital churches had more lay leaders, rotated them so that new people took on responsibility, and helped leaders grow spiritually and in effectiveness.
Pastoral leadership. Effective pastors were associated with vitality, particularly those who inspired and mentored lay leaders, and longer pastoral tenures were associated with higher vitality. In larger churches, pastors who spent more time on preaching and worship planning stood out.
Worship services. Churches offering a mix of traditional and contemporary services, and using topical sermon series, were more likely to be vital than churches offering only one style.

The study emphasized that no single factor made the difference. It was the combination that mattered.

What happened next

The Call to Action shaped much of the denomination's work in the following years. The "drivers of vitality" were taught in conferences and districts, used in training for clergy and lay leaders, and linked to a churchwide emphasis on vital congregations, in which churches were encouraged to set goals and report a small set of measures. Proposals to restructure the general church agencies, debated at the 2012 General Conference, drew on the same report; the main restructuring plan passed there was later ruled unconstitutional by the denomination's Judicial Council.

The findings overlapped considerably with the five practices framework, which many conferences were already using. Small groups correspond to intentional faith development; the worship findings to passionate worship. Some leaders presented the drivers as evidence for the practices; others saw them as a complementary, more data-driven lens.

Reading the study carefully

The study's strengths were its scale and its use of real data rather than anecdotes. Its limits are equally important for congregations trying to apply it.

Correlation, not causation. Vital churches have more small groups, but that does not prove that adding small groups makes a church vital. Energetic congregations may simply start more groups.
Size and context. Many findings differed by church size. Later guidance from the denomination's discipleship agency noted that in small churches, starting a second, different service was more often associated with low vitality than high.
What counts. A vitality index built from attendance and giving cannot capture faithfulness in declining towns, ministry with very poor communities, or fruit that grows elsewhere. See our essay on fruitfulness and numbers.
U.S. only. The data covered churches in the United States, not the growing churches of Africa, Asia and Europe.

A note on lay leadership

Of the four clusters, lay leadership received less attention in popular summaries than worship or small groups, perhaps because it is less visible. Yet it may be the most transferable lesson. Congregations in which the same handful of people hold every office for decades tend to stagnate, however capable those people are. Rotating responsibility, apprenticing newer members alongside experienced ones, and treating leadership roles as places of spiritual growth rather than administrative burden all appear in the study's description of vital churches.

Using the findings today

Read as questions rather than prescriptions, the drivers remain helpful for any congregation, Methodist or not. How many people belong to a small group? Are new people regularly given leadership responsibility? Does the pastor spend time equipping lay leaders, or doing everything alone? Is worship planned with care and variety appropriate to the congregation's size? A council that discusses those four questions honestly will learn more than one that adopts a program because a study recommended it.