Their primary motive is not their own growth. They are not, in that sense, self-centered. Rather, growth is a by-product of a deeper longing - to help others enter eternal life in Jesus Christ.

Their leaders combine humility about themselves with an unshakable conviction about the truth of the gospel and the authority of God's word. The humility often takes the form of both knowing and sharing their own brokenness and their experience of God's saving action in their hearts. Humility and conviction is a challenging combination. Without humility in the leader, all that gets multiplied is self-righteousness, and without conviction in the leader, growth almost never happens. Mothers and fathers not only produce children, with all the incarnational humility that entails, they also protect the boundaries of the family. The church family's boundaries are theological and spiritual as well as moral. When pastoral leaders are clear about them, the church grows; when they are unclear, the church becomes a shrinking arena of systemic anxiety. That, perhaps, is another article.

A growing parish family finds a way to multiple pastoral care. Most men and women cannot effectively pastor more than 150 people. Caring for all her members, new and old, pre-converted and filled with the Spirit, involves empowering members to pray with and pastor other members. The issue of caring for the members is, in my experience, immensely difficult to implement. Ordained pastors often will not acknowledge the unmet needs in their stagnant congregations. Many laity do not want anyone but the paid man or woman around them in any personal need. The universal mark of churches that are growing - from Holy Trinity, Brompton, in London, with its charismatic exuberance, to Willow Creek in Chicago, with its highly rational spirituality - is that as many as 20 percent of the members are equipped to do pastoral work. Good parents produce self-actualizing children. Good pastors produce other good pastors.

One strong mark of a church that is growing is that it has overcome our cultural aversion to teenagers. If you hang around a young mother with a little baby for a week, you will often hear well-meaning friends or relatives say - "Oh she's cute now, but wait until she is a teenager!" It's astonishing to me to go into Episcopal parishes and to hear, over and over - "Oh, we don't have teenagers." The parishes I named at the beginning of this article are jammed with teens. They lead worship. They minister in power. They act out and act up, but then repent. But they are profoundly, gratefully welcomed. Their music and their dress are allowed. One of my fondest memories of 10 years as a rector of a great parish was the day hundreds of them came running down the side aisles into the chancel to begin leading a real youth worship service. We all cried. The children had come back to the family.

One day something magical happened. I was visiting a mother in a vacation Bible school. Her 3-year-old girl had been cared for by about 25 teenagers that week. The mother actually said (I am not making this up), "I can't wait until she is a teenager, so she can be part of this wonderful group of young people." Alleluia!

Leaders who are personally humble but clear about the boundaries and purposes of the church, implementing a way in which every person in the group can both give and receive care; discerning the difference between the gospel and its packaging, so that we are utterly committed to the one and flexible to the other; and the effort to welcome the young back into the family - these are tasks my ministry has taught me need to be undertaken in our day if the church is to grow as a healthy family.

The people in growing churches can make a distinction that is critical. The lay and ordained leaders know the difference between the message of the gospel and the cultural package in which they received that message. It's normal and even healthy to feel a warm emotional attachment to the various media of the church in which we came to faith. The architecture, the music, the language, the clothing, the kinds of furniture, all acquire a holiness through association. We get velcroed to pointed ceilings and organ music and stained glass.

But gradually the texture of holiness that is comfortable for those inside the church becomes alien to those outside. Then joining the church becomes not simply a question of coming to faith, joining the church becomes a matter of acquiring a totally new taste in music, rhetoric, etc. What we need are services that are to worship what our narthexes are to our buildings. They probably need to be offered in the evening or at some time other than Sunday mornings, but the package that works reasonably well for the remnant of American Anglicans, the one-half of 1 percent of the country you will find actually in our churches on Sunday mornings, isn't helpful to most of the people of our generation. This is quite different than the message itself.

The gospel cannot be changed, and one of the things you find in rapidly growing churches of our time is a passionate commitment to justification by faith alone, a belief in the person and works and gifts of the Holy Spirit, compassionate and costly outreach, and above all an exaltation of Jesus. It's amazing to watch hundreds of secular people under 30 years old receiving Christ and worshiping him passionately. Of course, they do not use music a 50-year-old like me would use. So what? Their eternal souls are more important than my taste. It will take separate services, gingerly introduced to one another. But we cannot let our attachment to a particular package around the gospel message blind us to the need of the people of our culture.

The Rev. Jeffrey Black is vicar of a new mission congregation in the Diocese of Texas.

This article concludes the year-long series The Church Is a Family.