The term “church growth” makes me queasy, or at least, uneasy, in the same way that the term tilt-a-whirl makes me queasy at the fall fair or the announcement of turbulence makes me uneasy at 33,000 feet. I think the queasiness generates from the same place – I wonder who or what is driving this thing.
What are the motives behind church growth? Am I pursuing this to lift the name of Jesus higher or am I just trying to make a name for myself? Is this about Jesus or about me?
Don’t get me wrong – fundamentally, I believe churches are supposed to grow, and more importantly, God wants churches to grow and flourish. Jesus wouldn’t have said things like “take your light out from underneath that basket and let it shine” or “move into all the world and make disciples” if he was content with a church plan of maintenance or gradual decline.
God wants our churches growing and alive.
In God’s kindness I’ve witnessed this first-hand, most recently at St. Paul’s church in Leaskdale, Ont. A group of 40 people in worship in 1995 has grown to 10 times that and more here in 2008.
This is part of our story.
First of all we were, and continue to be, committed to introducing people to Jesus. We’re moving from talking about Him towards experiencing Him. We have said from the beginning that you can’t give away what you don’t have, so a top-shelf value at St. Paul’s is a deepening relationship with the Risen Jesus. Life begins with surrendering my life to Jesus and then Him infusing His Life into me. Life grows and continues; He lives His life in us.
Early on in our shared experience of the life of Christ, we found ourselves drawn to pray together regularly. In fact, we began to feel like this might be the most important thing we do together. There were four of us that first Tuesday morning at 8:30 sitting nervously on the hard oak pews of the sanctuary. It wasn’t fancy, prayers were often awkward and there was lots of silence, but we were compelled by our own desire to love Jesus better and the conviction that our little community needed Him far more than they knew.
Our experience is that God generally doesn’t allow praying just to happen for the sake of praying. We found that God answers! We were praying things like: “Let your Kingdom come here on earth as it is in Heaven,” and, “Would You increase our experience of Your love?” and stunningly, God began to answer those prayers.
Only it didn’t happen the way I imagined.
I thought church growth would be piles of new people busting through the church doors on Sunday mornings. I fantasized we would be like a Future Shop church where people camp out overnight so they can be first through the doors in the morning to get the latest gizmo. As if! What God did do was begin to address some of the goofy things in us. Truth broke out in places. One of our musicians admitted to a drinking problem. As he got honest and opened up over time, a number of others owned up to addictions. Jesus meets them regularly as they gather weekly. Others of our people who are divorced or are going through divorce have met together, with safe and godly leadership, to talk about the shame and loss they were experiencing. Jesus met them. A group of young moms shared a morning a week together, swapping birth stories and recipes. One, a Christian (my wife) begins to gently invite them to church. A number came; several met Jesus.
To my surprise, our Lord has begun to address some of the goofy things in me, the minister. I had imagined, when I came here, that I was going to help everyone else and set them straight. God urged me to get honest with some trustworthy people both inside and outside of the church. He began to identify things I was carrying that are incongruent with His life in me: insecurities that I had expended great energy trying to conceal, perfectionist tendencies, a suffocating competitiveness, fear, the desire for people to like me … the list is considerable. Contrary to our protective tendencies (hoping that if we hid our junk long enough, it would go away) we found that it was the truth that set us free. The cross of Jesus Christ began to transform lives as people owned up to what was really going on in their lives.
That’s when people outside the church began to get interested in what God was doing in our little church.
