Sometimes, when churches find themselves plateaued or dying, the church will ask questions like:
"What else can or should we be doing to help our church grow"? Or, "What shouldn’t we be doing"?
Or the church will ask the question in different way, “What can we do to help our church to grow?” My answer is: "That is the wrong question".
There is a principle in church growth that, sometimes, goes unnoticed by pastors. The principle is: if something is healthy, it will grow.
We see this principle in God’s creation. As we look at nature, we know that if a tree, for example, is healthy, it will grow. We also observe this principle in children. If a child is healthy, the child will grow. We don’t have to tell our children to grow. No, as long as we provide for the child and the child is healthy, the child will grow. Every child has been created by God in such a way, that, as long as the child is healthy, the child will grow. This is true of everything in God’s creation.
We don’t have to tell a tree to grow. No, as long as the tree receives proper care and nutrition and remains healthy, the tree, created by God, will grow.
The principle applies this way to the church: if a church is healthy, the church will grow. But, we must understand that there are all kinds of ways that a church can grow. Yes, the church can grow numerically (membership and attendance) but the church can also grow in ministries, in spiritual maturity, in missions, in giving, and in many other ways.
Some churches are located in areas where the population is so small that there would be, virtually, no way that the church could grow to be a mega-church. In other words, the church could never have thousands in attendance.
In a situation like this, a pastor and church have to come to grips with, numbers aside, can they determine whether they are growing without gauging that on the size of the church? The answer is “yes”, if the pastor and church will evaluate the health of the congregation and not the size.
The wrong question to ask is: “What can we do to help our church grow?”
The right question to ask is: What are we doing to hinder our church from growing, because if something is healthy, it will grow. What we must strive for in our churches is to be healthy.
Health has to do with the spiritual condition of believers in a church.
The size of a church has nothing to do with the health of a church. Some people in small churches think that big churches are not spiritual but they think a small church is spiritual. Some people in big churches think that small churches are not spiritual but they think that big churches are spiritual. (I'm not real sure what the medium size churches think about big churches and small churches!)
Size has nothing to do with the spiritual maturity of a church. The more important issue in church growth is church health (i.e., the spiritual condition of the believers). It is not so important how many attend a church but what kind of believers attend a church.
Now, this doesn’t mean that numbers are not important. In the early church (book of Acts), we know that the Lord added to the church daily and that means numerically and that means evangelism was going on.
Evangelism is critical to what we do in the church but every church should strive to be a balanced church. On one side is evangelism and on the other side is discipleship. This is what we find, in what most believers call, the Great Commission, found in Matthew 28:19-20. Jesus says,
"Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all things that I have commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age".
But the grammar of the Greek text does not reveal that the command in the verse is to "go". The command is to "make disciples". Had we heard Jesus that day speaking to His disciples, we would have heard Him say something like this: "As you are going, I command you to make disciples". It is almost as if Jesus assumes that His disciples, if they were following Him, would be in the process of going (evangelism) and His command to them was for them to make disciples (discipleship).
To be a balanced and healthy church, there must be both evangelism and discipleship. That is what we find in the early church in the book of Acts and this is the kind of church that would be fulfilling the “Great Commission”.
The question must be asked: “Which is more important: evangelism or discipleship”?
Well, of course, it is a trick question. Both are important and both should be the priorities in any church. When a church pursues both evangelism and discipleship, that church will be a balanced church and a healthy church.
Evangelism is the heart of what a church does. It can be described as addition, reaching, going, and winning. It is the “how many” of what a church does.
Discipleship is the health of what a church does. It can be described as multiplication, teaching, growing, and training. It is the “what kind” of what a church does.
“Evangelism that does not produce discipleship is not true evangelism and discipleship that does not produce evangelistic disciples is not true discipleship.” (Anonymous)
