Ridgell's Originals

OK. It is pretty clear by now that no one is going to hire me to tell them how to grow a mega church. I might want too much money and they may think the ideas I proposed were no good. So…

Read my blog yesterday and you can have all those ideas for free. Because if what you want to do is be a mega church, then you can get there that way. In fact, if you want to be a bigger church, you can use those ideas. Or, if you are worried about not getting smaller, you can steal those ideas.

But by now most of you have figured out that I don’t like the idea of trying to be a mega – big – or bigger than you are – church. You are chasing the wrong thing. If that is the goal, you end up in some of the absurd traps I talked about yesterday. And yes, of course I was sarcastic (tho I am still open to the big consulting checkJ).

I am convinced God controls growth. All we can do is control the process. There are two great phrases about church growth.

The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved. Acts 2: 47

When Paul talked about church growth, he said neither he nor Apollos were anything, only …God, who makes things grow. I Corinthians 3: 7

Kingdom growth is about reaching the lost. Troop transfer among the Lord’s army is not growth. If my church grows because all the people from your church came to join us, I am not sure that is kingdom growth. Fear of people going somewhere else leads to those horrible ideas from yesterday’s post. But that is the trap many churches fall into. When you find yourselves asking what do we do to be bigger it becomes too easy to look for the magic bullet. And there isn’t one. And a lot of good and healthy processes get perverted into something very unhealthy.

I see lots of large churches that are not growing. And I see lots of churches getting larger but not really growing. Some churches have gotten smaller but they are actually really growing.

Growing churches – mega or not – never start out to be a bigger church. They start out by deciding to do what God calls His people to do. In fact, many of them don’t care if they are big or not. They let God worry about the results. And the churches that set out to get bigger, never really grow.

So I love those churches that grow from 20 to 25 because someone taught the family next door about Jesus. Or the church that grew from 2000 to 2500 because their members started telling their friends, family, and neighbors the Jesus story.

Or the church that grew from 500 to 300 when 300 members left because this whole living Jesus out in our world was too much to ask. But the ones that stayed bought in to the radical concept of a community of believers living out their faith and inviting others to join them on that journey. And God made them grow.

And some church got those 300 members and may have thought they were growing. So we let God control the growth, or we try to control the growth. One works. One doesn’t.

# posted by Steve @ 12:47 PM