If Church Growth is Not the Point, What Is?

Ok, I know the term church growth is out of style and that it really bothers some people in Christian leadership circles.  (I find that the ire it raises in church leaders is often directly proportional to the growth or lack of growth of the churches they have led.)  I also know that for some church growth has become all about numbers and dollars and making the pastor a star.  You can call it church growth, or you can say it is the church doing the mission, or being the church, or call it the missional church.  The point is to get more people to become disciples of Jesus Christ.  Just as healthy, normal human bodies grow, healthy, normal churches grow.  If the church is a group that truly cares about each other and worries that friends and neighbors are headed for hell, it will grow.  In fact, I think if a church lives up to Jesus’ purpose for it, it can’t help but grow.  Strip it all down to the most basic terms and you find that our assignment is to do the Great Commandments of loving God and loving others, and to fulfill the Great Commission to make disciples.  If a group is doing that, people will want to be a part of the fellowship. 

What bugs me are the lids that church people and even some church leaders put on the church.  These lids keep the church from being what God designed her to be.  Here are a few of the most popular lids.  You can probably add to the list:

We want to know everybody.

If your church has an attendance over 40 you don’t know everyone.  Besides if you know everyone the church has not been reaching out.

We want to grow spiritually.  It is not necessary for us to grow numerically. 

If you are growing spiritually you should be learning how desperately people need the Gospel. 

We need to keep traditions alive. 

Not if they get in the way of helping people find the love, hope and salvation Christ offers.

We might offend some people in the church. 

Apologize and refer them to the mission to save the lost.

We might offend some unbelievers. 

The Gospel often offends the people who need it the most.

I actually know of pastors who say they don’t want any more people because they don’t want to work that hard. 

Get another job.  Check your calling.  Maybe you shouldn’t be leading a church.

If we grow we will need to expand our building and that is expensive. 

First of all, there are alternatives.  Second, get over your fear and trust God to provide.

We might get new people who are not like us. 

Expand your horizon.  It was tough for the early Jewish Christians to accept Gentile believers.  Grow up.

The pastor won’t be able to give me as much attention. 

Grow up and let other members of the body minister to you.

If we grow someone might come to church that sings better than I do and he will get all the solos (or play piano, guitar, etc.)            

Listen to yourself.  When did the church become about you?

If we grow there will be new people in leadership and I won’t have as much control. Jesus should be in control anyway.  Why do you need to be in control?  Whose church is this?  Is it yours because you give a lot, or Jesus’ church because He paid for it with His blood?

If a church is going to grow, or become truly missional, or truly be the church, it will have to face up to these lids and find ways of removing them.  Hopefully, that means the people will have a change of heart and realize that it is more important for their neighbor to find Jesus than it is for them to have things their own way.  Unfortunately, too often the only ways those lids are removed is for certain people to leave in a huff.  Many church plants are started because the pastor discovered it was easier to start a church from scratch than to remove lids at an established church. 

All of us … from the church leader, to the seminary professor, to Joe and Mary pewsitter … need to look at ourselves.  Am I a lid?  Is my talk or my attitude keeping the church from building God’s Kingdom?  What scares me about the growth of my church, and why?  How does God want me to work to help other people become followers of Christ? 

Church Reputation

One of my wife’s co-workers had just been hired at a church in a town that we would pass through as we drove down the interstate, so we decided to keep an eye out for it.  Since it was a big church in town of about 20,000, we thought it might be visible from the freeway.  Tina was curious about the place and we needed a break, so when we stopped at an Arby’s for lunch. I asked the girl at the counter if she knew where the New Springs Church was located. She smiled and said, “Oh yes, that’s a great church. Everybody knows it.” I asked her if she went there. She said no, but she had friends that went there and she had been there a couple of times. I asked her for directions. She said, “Well, it’s out on such and such road.” I told her I was just passing through and didn’t know that road. She called her manager over and told her I was looking for New Springs Church. She gave directions that included three or four turns. I had hoped to catch a glimpse of the church as we sped by on t, but that wasn’t possible so we decided not to look it up. However, I asked the manager if she attended New Springs. She said no, but she knew the church because her grandkids had played basketball there and attended Vacation Bible School. “It’s a wonderful church. They do lots of stuff for people.” Just then another worker walked up and said, “Yeah, they help a lot of people. I go to another church, but if I didn’t, I would go to New Springs.” I thanked them, and we went on to our destination.

We never did see the church, but I got a mental picture of it. It’s a place that reaches out to the community, has a great reputation, and serves as a great embassy for the Kingdom of God in Anderson, South Carolina. I still haven’t been there, and I don’t know the pastor, Perry Noble, personally, (although I have become a fan of his articles on churchleaders.com). I have no reason to toot New Springs’ horn. I’m just reporting what happened and drawing this conclusion: this church must be doing a lot of things right, and I wish more churches had this kind of reputation in their communities. My mentor, Dan Harman, used to say that he wanted there to be three kinds of people in our town: those who went our church, those who went to another church but said they would go to our church if they weren’t involved in that church, and those who didn’t go to church anywhere but said that if they started going to church it would be our church. From my small sampling at Arby’s that day, it looks like New Springs has been able to do that in their town.   

What would happen if someone got off the interstate in your town and asked the people about your church at the local Arby’s or McDonalds? Would they get directions or a blank stare? Would the traveler hear good things about your church? Do the people in your town know about your church and is what they know positive? The people I spoke to that day didn’t talk about the great pastor. They spoke about how the church cares about people and reaches out to the community. (One of the people did mention that the worship was great, but that was far from the first thing they said about the church.) Big church, small church, whatever size your church is, it needs to build a reputation in your town for doing the great commandments. If it does that, it will almost automatically follow that the great commission will be accomplished. Here’s the thing. There’s only way to build this kind of reputation and that’s for the members to really learn to love people who don’t come to church and who may not be anything like the church members. You can’t program that. You can only teach it and, more importantly, model it.