Blockbuster Churches in a Netflix World
By Will Mancini, founder of RunFree.co and author of Future Church: 7 Laws of Real Church Growth.
Blockbuster didn't die because Netflix had better technology.
It died because it was running on a governing assumption that turned out to be wrong: people want to leave their house to rent a movie.
For decades, that assumption stayed invisible, because it worked. Stores opened. Revenue grew. The model scaled. Nobody questioned the foundation, because the foundation kept producing results.
Until it didn't.
I can't stop thinking about what that means for the local church.
The Assumption Behind Today's Church Growth Model
For the last 30 years, the dominant church growth model has rested on a governing assumption of its own: if we can get people into our building and move them through our programs, disciples will form.
You know the pathway. Attend. Connect. Serve. It's the backbone of the program-driven model most of us were trained in.
And like Blockbuster's, that assumption worked for a season. Churches grew. Campuses multiplied. Attendance became the metric of health. Nobody questioned the foundation, because the foundation kept producing results.
Success Makes Assumptions Hard to See
Here's the tricky thing about a governing assumption. It isn't written in your bylaws or printed on your website. It lives underneath your calendar, your budget, your staff structure, and your scorecard.
You can usually find it by asking one question: what does your team celebrate on Monday morning?
If the answer is mostly headcount, baptisms from the weekend service, and how many new people filled out a connection card, your model is telling you what it believes. It believes the building is where disciples are made.
Nobody audits a model that's growing. That's exactly why the assumption survives so long.
The Question Underneath the Question
So here's the uncomfortable question: were those results actually disciples?
Look at your own church honestly. You know the people who have been attending for five, seven, ten years. You know which ones are genuinely different: transformed, multiplying, shaped by mission. And you know the ones who are loyal, generous, present every Sunday, and essentially unchanged.
What's the ratio?
This isn't a guilt exercise. Most of those people love Jesus and love your church. The question isn't about their faithfulness. It's about what your model was designed to produce.
Running the Model Harder Won't Fix It
When growth stalls, most teams reach for tactics. Better signage. A sharper welcome team. A new next-steps class. A fresh sermon series on serving.
These aren't bad ideas. But they all optimize the model. None of them question it.
Better store layouts and friendlier clerks wouldn't have saved Blockbuster. The problem wasn't execution. It was the belief underneath the execution.
That's not a tactics problem. It's not even a strategy problem. It's a governing assumptions problem, and you can't fix it by running the current model harder or smarter.
What a Netflix-Era Church Assumes Instead
Here's the hopeful part. Netflix didn't win by building a better store. It went where people already were.
The church has always had that option, because Jesus built it in from the start. Paul describes church leaders as the ones who equip God's people for works of service. The work happens through the people, not just inside the building.
A Netflix-era church runs on a different governing assumption: disciples are formed and multiplied where people live, work, and play. The weekend gathering still matters, but it becomes a launching point instead of the finish line.
When that shift happens, the scorecard changes too. You start counting disciples who make disciples, not just seats that get filled. That's the heart of disciple-making the way Jesus modeled it. And it's the foundation for naming a mission that's truly yours, not a generic one borrowed from every church on the planet.
The 7 Laws Test Your Governing Assumptions
This is exactly why I wrote Future Church.
The 7 Laws of Real Church Growth exist for this moment. Each law names a governing assumption your church is either building on or quietly violating. Together, they form the most honest diagnostic I know for whether your model is producing what Jesus had in mind.
Not attendance. Disciples.
We distilled the laws into a free bullet book you can read in one sitting. It's a fast read with framework-level clarity, and it's honest in a way that changes what you do next.
Three Questions for Your Next Team Meeting
Before you change anything, get your team talking. Bring these three questions to your next leadership meeting:
- What do we celebrate most on Monday morning, and what does that reveal about what we believe produces disciples?
- If attendance dropped by half but every remaining person was making disciples where they live, work, and play, would we call that a win?
- If we were starting this church from scratch today, which of our current programs would we still build?
If those questions surface more than you expected, The 4 Tests of a Disciple-Making Church will help you go one layer deeper.
Your Next Step
Get the 7 Laws this week. Share it with your lead team. Then ask the question every pastor eventually has to answer: are we building on an assumption that will actually hold?
If your team is ready to name a new foundation and turn it into a plan, that's what Vision Clarity is built for. If your team needs to get healthy before tackling the big questions, a Team Coaching sprint should come first.
Or if you'd rather talk it through, book an intro call.