In preparation for our upcoming series, “Listen”, which starts this weekend, I’m doing a series of posts this week on why our church should grow.
As you read these reasons, hopefully you’ll come up with more. When you do, post them in the comments or email them to me. They could make it in a future post. Reasons should complete the statement, “Our church should grow because…”.
(Remember, growth is both spiritual and numerical. Don’t get hung up on just one or the other.)
Let’s start off with some obvious ones today. I mentioned some of these in our service yesterday.
1. There are still people who don’t know Christ. This is probably the most obvious one. Until every person alive is a believer in Jesus Christ, churches have no business not growing.
It’s been said (and I agree) that failure to grow is a church’s ultimate act of selfishness.
2. There are still immature believers. This is the second most-obvious one. (Sorry, I took the easy ones.) An immature believer is anyone who has accepted God’s salvation through Jesus Christ but is not yet a fully-devoted follower of Christ.
On one hand, no one does that perfectly yet. On the other hand, God both enables and expects every believer to grow up in Him. Because this is primarily a matter of choice on our part, a person can say, “I am a fully-devoted follower of Christ,” without arrogance or lying.
There are immature believers both inside and outside of our church. And God wants every one of you to grow up.
3. God has big things for us to do. The fact is, the smaller a church is (numerically), the fewer resources it has to do God’s work. And I’m not talking about just money. God can financially bless a small church – it’s his treasury.)
I’m mostly talking about people. Every person who becomes a member of a church brings with him or her a wealth of natural abilities and spiritual giftedness that the church may not have had before. Whenever a person (you) plugs into a local church, that church is richer for it and better equipped to do God’s Kingdom work in this world.
OK, those are (some of) the easy ones. How many can you come up with before this Sunday?
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I think God wants us to grow as a statement to this community what God can do in difficult times. With the media attention we get with the airport issue, showing God still at work in our “little” church shows how much God is still involved even in the little things.