Mucky Declarations

Today in Sunday School, we had a powwow. One of the adult leaders in our class is also a participant in the recent “Church Growth Strategy Team” that has evidently been formed. He wanted to get feedback from the class regarding how the church could change things in order to grow. I immediately put on my disconcerted face. I briefly had visions of participating in Purpose Driven Life seminars for the next month. Scott (the leader) discussed some disturbing statistics that had come up in his meetings, such as the fact that the church’s budget was around $400,000 yet the church had only had 10 baptisms in the past year, which boiled down to $40,000 per baptism, an unsightly figure. The discussion then proceeded to be a brainstorming session on how we could make things more palatable for visitors, and in order to keep people coming back, both as visitors and members. After a few minutes of this, I asked whether the point of this team was to discuss how to get more people at our church, or how to make more Christians. Scott quickly chose the latter. From there, several topics came up, many of which I thought were quite beneficial. Here are some of the points that I tried to hit home: 1) If you have to throw a circus to get people to come to church, you will have to continue throwing them to get them to come back. 2) Churches have too long been concerned with attendance, rather than building the kingdom of God. 3) Churches have too long made evangelism the sole job of the pastor on Sunday mornings that they have neglected the gathering together of believers to build up, strengthen, encourage, and teach them. 4) We have churches full of shallow Christians because the church has put them on mission looking for new members before they have trained them adequately in their faith. Thus most of the membership is tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine that is thrown at them. 5) The Christian life is not entirely and solely about evangelism. It is about glorifying God. Evangelism will naturally happen when the focus of the believer is on glorifying God with his entire lifestyle. It is this end that the church should focus on, and let the symptomatic issues take care of themselves. An old pastor of mine used to say: “Get the headship issue straight, and all the other ships will fall into place (worship, discipleship, fellowship, etc.).” 6) Churches need to make a point of being intentional with their activities. Quite often the leadership decides to have activities with an intent in mind, but fail to communicate that intent to the members. A “fellowship” between Christians, and a “fellowship” with the intent to build relationships with unbelievers should be treated differently, and not be done at the same time. 7) A watering down of doctrine and of method need not occur in order to attract new people. A church is comprised of people, and it is the people that should be built up, and not the activity list or innovation of the programs. It is the mindset of the members that needs to be addressed, and not the programs that the churches put on. Ten thousand pot luck dinners with nobody interested in evangelizing will not bring anyone to Christ, although it may keep them coming back to your church, albeit not for the right reasons. 8) A church would be better off with ten truly devoted and discipled believers, and no other membership whatsoever, than with 10,000 Sunday morning “Christians,” with no thought of living for God when they left the doors of the building. This is to say that the membership, or even attendance, of a church is not necessarily correlated to the depth of belief of their membership. That being the case, evangelism should not be about numbers, but about developing disciples. 9) Churches should not, then, center all of their programs on evangelism. Sometimes inviting a non-Christian visitor to a bible study is not a good thing. Entertaining an argumentative atheist in the middle of a new Christian accountability group would probably end up badly. 10) Any church growth that is based on anything other than the procurement of true disciples of Christ is a mere product of ear-tickling, and should be avoided at all costs. We are told in scripture that the gospel is offensive, and will divide rather than bring together. We as the church must accept this, and realize that it is our job to preach the gospel, and to make disciples, and that although watering and planting and pruning are our tasks, it is God alone that gives the increase.