Posts by John Hayward
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Church Growth and the Perils of Second-Order Feedback
Feedback is the process where an action has an effect, which in turn changes the original action. Either it magnifies it – reinforcing feedback; or it corrects it – balancing feedback
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Feedback and Church Growth
Feedback in a system that changes over time is the mechanism where an action results in an effect, which then, in turn, influences the original action. The action literally “feeds […]
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A Prophecy of Church Decline
At the beginning of the New Year, David Robertson, a well-known Free Church of Scotland minister and blogger, gave ten prophecies for 2017 [1]. One of these particularly caught my […]
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Infectious Church Growth
An “Agent-Based” View The central hypothesis I use to model church growth is that religious belief spreads like an infectious disease. This principle is built into the limited enthusiasm model […]
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The Rise and Decline of British Methodism
Application of the Institutional Model of Church Growth Some while ago I introduced a model of church membership that explain the rapid growth of a church, only to be followed […]
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Rise and Decline of Western Civilisation
Brexit, Corbyn and Trump It has been an interesting year in politics! I started writing this on the day that Jeremy Corbyn was re-elected leader of the British Labour Party. […]
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Modelling Secularisation
Part 3 of Christianity versus the Diversity Ideology In two previous blogs [1,2] I have been constructing a dynamic model of the competition between Christianity and the new secular ideology. […]
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Churches or Political Parties: Who has the Largest Membership?
Who has the greatest membership in the UK, the churches or the politcial parties? How do the dynamics of growth and decline compare?
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Revival is Real
After all the blogs on church decline, I felt I needed to write on something more positive. Not that I am negative about the future of the Christian church. The […]
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Conversion to the Diversity Ideology
Part 2 – Justification of Hypotheses In a previous blog [1] I outlined a system dynamics model of how Christianity is losing ground to a new movement in society, which […]
In 1904-5, Moriah chapel was the centre of massive church growth in Wales through a God-sent revival.