How NOT to Grow a Church

My first church in 1981 was a new church start, and in 2003 I came back full circle to where I began, and that is being involved in a brand new church start.

In no way do I consider myself an expert in church starts. If I ever do write a book on church starts, it probably would be titled, How NOT to Grow a Church. The first part of the book would entail all the mistakes I made at my first church, and what I hopefully learned from that experience. The second part of the book would be how my theological shift since 1993 has affected my whole outlook on church starts and church growth in general.

In order to keep this article short, I will skip over the first half of this imaginary book, and delve right into the second part of the book. And to keep it even shorter, I will just major on one or two key elements on How NOT to Grow a Church based upon what I believe is the essential doctrinal foundation for every church, big or small, new or old.

For starters, not all growth is good or should be desired. This is what I would tell all church starters out there. Really, based upon the latest trends and fads in church life, growing a church is not that difficult, if you listen to all the experts in the field. Just do what everybody else is doing, and you can get people to come. Such new church starts are popping up everywhere, and they report pretty phenomenal results numerically.

At my first church, I thought that was what it was all about, and did I ever get depressed when our store-front church in Michigan did not take off like a rocket! I thought it all depended upon me, no matter how piously I prayed otherwise.

Now what I have learned since then is that the pastor's chief function as the shepherd of the sheep is to fill the pulpit and not fill the pews. He fills the pulpit by preaching the Word of God. That is not a novel concept; it is as old as the epistles in the New Testament. It is a novel concept today though. Every pastor desires to see growth, numerically and spiritually, but not growth at the expense of the marginalization of Scriptures.

I have seen churches taken off quickly, and I have seen them also disintegrate just as quickly, even churches built upon a solid foundation. Quick growth can have its lethal components at time.

Success today can only spell failure tomorrow, if we let things go to our heads or if we don't plod along faithfully, even if it means that some will abandon ship along the way.

From day one in our latest church start adventure, I have prayed this: "Lord, You bring the people You want to be here." It is an almost unwritten rule that in every church start, there will be some people who come and go for a variety of reasons, not all of them for bad reasons, but nonetheless they will leave. That is always sad from a pastor's perspective, but since my theological shift in 1993, I can handle it a whole lot better now than what I did back the years following 1981.

In every church start, and now I am speaking in particular those churches who want to start out with a solid doctrinal foundation, there will be curiosity seekers who will attend from time to time. There will be some that float from church to church. There are some who never settle down. There will be some who are still trying to find that perfect church after two, three, five, or ten years of trying. There are those who come to "check you out" and are professional speck inspectors. There are some who want to be the big fish in the small pond. There are those who have had a bad track record in previous churches. Some Calvinists have fangs and claws. Some Calvinists have a sour disposition. Some Calvinists think one must be immersed in pickle juice. Some Calvinists have all head but no heart. Wolves can come dressed up on Sunday mornings wearing wool.

Guess what? Those kind of people mentioned above you don't want to grow your church around. If you do, then you have a bag full of troubles awaiting you down the line. At my first church start, since I believed all growth was good growth, I would accept anybody if they could just hear lightning and see thunder. Now I've come to realize that all that glitters is not gold.

A pastor and a people should be friendly and congenial to all who show up on Sundays. We should never be quick to judge, nor should we act like moral policemen ready to drive people away since they don't measure up to our expectations. We should invite people to our church, and above all else, we should witness to the lost, and we should invite people back once they do attend. We want growth, and we want the Lord to bless His work. At all times we should be people that are known by our love for our Lord and for one another.

Having said and done all that, we still pray with all sincerity, "Lord, You bring the people You want to be here." I say this as advice to all church starters out there, because I know it is tough work, especially if you do it the right way and not the popular way. This will help you from getting discouraged, because maybe at those times when people visit and don't return, and you have done everything you know how to minister to them in Jesus' name, or when certain people decide to leave the church, and it breaks your heart like nothing else, then maybe, just maybe, God is answering that prayer.

And what should we do when God answers prayer? We should say, "Thank you, Lord, for answering our prayer, for You are the Chief Shepherd of the sheep." God truly sees the big picture, when all we see at times is the Kodak moment.

Yours for the growth God desires,
Chris
1 Thessalonians 1:2-10

How Inclusive Must We Go?

I have before me the full transcript of a presidential inauguration prayer. . .the one that has gone largely unnoticed due to the furor created by another inauguration prayer made by Rev. Joseph Lowery.

In the prayer made by Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, popular author, and often billed as America's pastor and the next Billy Graham, he made some very far-reaching statements that have ignited all sorts of reactions from various groups of people.

The prayer was designed intentionally to be inclusive of people of all faiths and all walks of life. At the beginning, to appeal to the Jewish segment, he quoted the familiar Shema out of Deuteronomy, a foundational Jewish prayer. Immediately on the heels of that, he referred to God and "the compassionate and merciful one." That God truly is, but all Muslims recognize that as the invocation given at the beginning of every chapter except one in the Qur'an, "In the name of Allah, the compassionate, the merciful."

A little later in his prayer, Pastor Warren says, "We are so grateful to live in this land of unequaled possibility, where the son of an African immigrant can rise to the highest level of our leadership. And we know today that Dr. King and a great cloud of witnesses are shouting in heaven." Such sentimental thoughts may be nice, but they are hardly biblical. We have no scriptural authority to rest on that the the witnesses in heaven, i.e. only justified believers in Jesus Christ alone, can witness the events on earth. More importantly, though, it is hard to tell who Rick Warren believes who are the ones who are the witnesses in heaven.

After these remarks, Pastor Warren delves into a World Council of Churches social gospel type of prayer litany. He concludes his prayer by reciting the traditional Lord's prayer, which was preceded by this statement, "I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life--Yeshua, Isa, Jesus (Spanish pronunciation), Jesus. . ."

Isa is the Qur'an's spelling of Jesus, a prophet of God but he is no way in the eyes of Muslims a prophet on par with Muhammad. Isa can not be fully trusted, nor can the Bible. Isa did not die on the cross; Judas Iscariot did. Isa was not the divine Son of God. Isa is not the only way to God. Isa was not resurrected from the dead. Isa does not reign in heaven now. Isa is not King of kings and Lord of lords. There is no forgiveness or atonement from sin by Isa. Jesus of the Bible in no way compares with the Isa of the Qur'an.

Yet, Pastor Warren saw no apparent conflict in using the name of Isa as a substitute for Jesus in his inclusive prayer.

The reaction to Rick Warren's prayer has been mixed. Some laud it as being generously inclusive as he tried to reach out to all groups of people. Others, though, who some might think would appreciate his attempt to include everyone, are very critical of Warren's effort to straddle the fence and of trying too hard to to be all things to all people. Catholics are upset that "for thine is the kingdom and the power and the glory for ever and ever" was used, since they don't say that line in their recitation of the Lord's Prayer. Others see it as a very non-inclusive prayer since invoking Jesus' name alienates non-Christians. Muslims may think the quotation from the Qur'an was just a bone thrown to appease all Muslims. Jews found the mention of Jesus as offensive. Even though Pastor Warren used words from Jewish, Christian and Muslim holy texts, he is finding criticisms from all groups of people of "faith", the very groups he wanted so much to please in his inclusive prayer.

So what do we learn from all this? If our best efforts to be "inclusive" of all peoples encounter hostile or critical reactions from the people we want to "include", then why even try? How inclusive must we go in order to be liked by all people? Are we going to get to the place where if you just breathe, no matter if you are a Muslim, Hindu, atheist, or lesbian, then that means you are loved by God and He will accept you into His heaven, whatever that is and whatever you want it to be?

How "inclusive" is God? "Jacob I have loved, but Esau I have hated." Was Jesus being inclusive in John 14:6? Was the apostle Paul being "inclusive" in Acts 17 when he met up with a different people of "faith", who were idol worshippers, or did he say instead, "God is now declaring to men that all everywhere should repent, because He has fixed a day in which He will judge the world in righteousness through a Man whom He has appointed, having furnished proof to all men by raising Him from the dead"?

Let us not confuse citizenship in this country, where we can be and are inclusive, with citizenship in the kingdom of God, where most people are excluded because they have not believed in Christ alone for their salvation and repented from their sin.

Rather than trying to bend over backwards to show how big-hearted and open-minded we are, how about us being faithful to the One who has called us and to the Word which He has given to us? I don't remember reading that what we want to hear from God one day is something along the lines of, "Well done, good and inclusive servant, enter now into the joy of the Lord," but instead we should desire to hear, "Well done, good and FAITHFUL servant, enter now into the joy of the Lord."


Exclusively for Christ,
Chris