Video Transcript: Health vs. Growth
Welcome back to Christian leaders Institute. So glad to be with you today as we continue our discussion on church revitalization. And today we're going to be really getting into the heart of these next three lectures the heart of what really is church revitalization? And what was our goal and in some of the things that will help us define and determine what it is that we're actually trying to do. I think this is an important conversation for us to have. Because when I started to do church revitalization, I didn't even know in a sense what I was trying to accomplish. I didn't. If you asked me to define what is church revitalization, I would have said, well, I guess if things are going better or more people are coming, I didn't have a really clear sense of even where I was trying to lead my people. So I'm going to try to help you today in the next couple of lectures to really define this is what church revitalization looks like. This is what it will take to renew a ministry. So let's, as we always do, I want to pray for you. In this time we have together Father in heaven, thank you so much for this day, wherever my dear friends are watching and listening to this Lord, I pray that You would bless them. Give them ears to hear what your spirit has to say, God work in their hearts and Lord, strengthen them, encourage them, in this great task of working in your kingdom, may their labor produce much fruit Lord, I pray your blessing and the gift of your spirit upon them. Amen. Okay, so let's just take a step back. So in the United States, post World War II was something significant happened. Starting in the 19, late 1950s, early 1960s, there started to be a decline in church attendance, there started to be a decline in the role that Christianity had in culture, its influence, and certainly in the late 1960s, and the hippie movement, and then in the 70s, with Watergate and kind of disillusionment, just the church had less and less and less influence. So anyway, the the end, the latter half of the 20th century, after this had been going on for some time. A lot of churches, a lot of denominations felt the need to reverse this trend. And they were working from this basic assumption that attendance and membership statistics were a direct measurement of vitality and faithfulness. So kind of like the numbers didn't lie, what was going on. And so they wanted to address this. And out of that came something that was been known as the Church Growth Movement, that the church was shrinking, and they wanted the church to grow again. And that was a very well intentioned movement, obviously, but with it came some really bad things. We're going to talk about that we didn't say a bad in the sense that they weren't terribly biblical. In in first and foremost, it was this fascination with statistics, that if if the numbers were good, then that meant you were doing good. And so with this fascination on numbers, which, even though the Church Growth Movement started in the 80s, and really kind of exploded in the 90s, we're still living very much in the after effects of that today, it's still very much shades are thinking about what a church is supposed to be. And if we're not growing and getting bigger, we're failing. And it's, again, it's had a lot of implications. So let's just talk about some of those implications. The problems
that kind of came along with this mentality that bigger is always better and more numbers equals more health and vitality. One, really created a consumer driven culture. And so, one writer James Crumley. He comments on this phenomenon
that in trying to attract crowds and numbers, you become very much like a business, who's trying to meet the needs of a consumer who's not buying your product and And so you're going to change the way you do things in order to get that consumer to be kind of like more interested in your product, which would be the church or faith or however you want to describe it. And this is what James Crumley says. And he's writing an essay called setting the church's agenda. The church is tempted to become relevant to the people of this culture by using their wishes and criteria, rather than those of the church. Evangelism is driven by a market or consumer oriented mentality. The church can meet people's needs as people define their needs. Thus, the people who may have little or no recent experience in the church, develop the evaluation of the church. And the church struggled to fulfill their expectations. So one of the things that happened with this idea of just to summarize what Crumley is saying is that the church in order to, and again well intentioned, to reach out and bring people in and to change the numbers started to say, well, what is it that the people want? What what are they? What are they missing? And there's part of that that's just a really good question that churches need to address. But it got to the point, though, where it was the people who were not Christians, who began setting the agenda for what churches would be doing, it wasn't scripture, it wasn't people within the church, it was this hope that if we could reach out to these non believers, and discover what they want, then we'll make our church about that. Now, hopefully, you can see why that's just a terrible approach and how that can lead to all sorts of problems. Now, there were a few ways that were done. Couple models of churches, called an attractional model where you do things and offer programs or that would attract people to come in. Or another way of doing this was called a seeker sensitive or a seeker driven, where you were just very aware of the idea with people who had never been to church before. And again, there was there was some wisdom in that there was some value with that, but it kind of was kind of like a runaway train, though, to the point where people started, who started looking for churches, you know, became really like, well, if you don't have this, I'm not interested in. I'm not interested in the church that doesn't have yoga and karate classes. And I'm looking for a church that has X, Y and Z when, you know, in terms of a style of worship, that might be very much more entertainment than worship, or, or whatever it was, in the church, really, broadly speaking, the American church, the American Evangelical Church, kind of lost its, its, its its bearings, or its moorings, what it was tied to what a church was supposed to be. And the focus became on what are the felt needs of the people? How do we minister to that? Rather than how are we glorifying God? How do we exalt the name of Jesus, in our location in our generation? Okay, so
another point and it was kind of closely related here is there was this Triumph of methodology over theology. And if there is a relentless drive to draw a crowd or to establish a market, whether you're a church or a business, it's always going to open a door to compromise. Bill Henard, who wrote a wonderful book on church
revitalization called can these bones live said this. In our world today, we have learned how to grow churches through a variety of means. We have become so concise and advanced in our methodology, technology in programming, that a church can grow, and quite possibly have never mentioned the name of Jesus. Isn't that something? Isn't that amazing that we can grow a church without really ever having a focus on Jesus. And I can personally attest to this a couple of years ago, I went to a church I joined them in worship. And it was kind of the growing church. It was the church a lot of people had been talking about and it was not far from me. And so I decided to go to it. And the music was great, the was very warm fellowship. The pastor had a solid message. But at no point. It was you know about kind of, you know how to live a better life and everything he said was, you know, kind of out of the Bible and made sense and was God's wisdom. But at no point did we ever get to talking about Jesus, I mean, it wasn't like, glorifying and, and honoring the Lord at all. But kind of on the outside all the things about the atmosphere, and the kind of coffee and style of worship and the atmosphere that was created in the facility, it all matched, like all the things you're kind of supposed to do. And yet the name of Jesus was never, like, intentionally acknowledged, or, or lifted up. And I don't even think in the whole sermon, the name of Jesus was even mentioned. So it wasn't in any way, like proclamation or declaration of the good news. And so if we're so focused on our methodology, we can really compromise and say, well, we're not we're going to, we're not going to so much promote the Jesus piece than, than this other thing, who we just put our focus in the wrong area. And one other thing. We touched on this recently in another lecture, but an emphasis on growing a church making the church bigger, really began to redefine the pastor's role in pursuit of ever increasing numbers. The pastor is not so much a holy man or a spiritual shepherd of the flock, but he's more of an or she is more of an entrepreneur, who can grow this institution and, you know, can say, well, we've grown by 12%, this year, or whatever. And as a result, and I would include myself in this, hardworking pastors began to be, you know, spending a lot of time thinking things, you know, like studying sociology, learning about marketing, and trying to market the church better. Rethinking or redeveloping worship our church, we got several demographic studies in order to be up to date on the, you know, the latest movements and trends. And I read a ton of books on church growth theories. And really, what that meant for me and for a lot of other people was that the emphasis of what I spent my time on, really moved away from traditional pastoral duties, to, to things that would help grow a church, I was even on one conference I'd attended. And the gentleman who was presenting there said that
pastors if we're trying to grow our church, that we should just, you know, borrow somebody else's sermons, or just download somebody else's sermons or just have the church watch somebody else's sermon for the next year or two, while we just grow the church. And that just never sounded right to me that I feel like God calls me to preach, that's a big calling, to speak to my people about where they're at, and what they need in God's Word in their life, not just downloading something from someone else. So anyway, these are some of the problems that kind of came out of the Church Growth Movement. Again, it was well intentioned, and I was grateful that people were alert to what was going on, that the church was in decline. But the way that they went about it really kind of focused on statistics and drawing crowds. I think the, the kind of the theory behind that leaves, definitely the church open to compromise and some problems. And so let's talk about really what the scripture has to say about crowds and numbers and statistics and all those kinds of things. Well, I would say this, even though that that is often so much the focus of churches, especially churches in decline, churches that are interested in doing revitalization, we need to bear in mind that there is no direct command anywhere. I mean, nowhere to increase attendance. nowhere in Scripture in the Old Testament about getting more people to come to the temple. Nowhere in the New Testament in Acts or in any of Paul's letters. Is there anything that says, you need to get more people. And this idea that drawing a crowd equates to success is not only I would say inaccurate, it's even somewhat like antithetical to the ministry of Christ. Now we know with the ministry of Jesus, he spent three years preaching and teaching the Good News of the Kingdom of God, he commissioned His disciples to go to the ends of the earth, and to do the same, yet, Jesus does not seek out the crowds. In fact, Jesus, when a crowd would gather, he would often withdraw from the crowd, he would try to hide from the crowd or he would dismiss the crowd. For those who are really interested in language studies, in, in the Greek in the Gospel of Mark, the use of the word crowds by John Mark is often used to describe like, those who are kind of flipping flopping, kind of they're uncommitted. They're there for like the free bread and fish sandwiches that Jesus is giving out, but they're not really willing to follow Him. And so the term crowds is actually kind of a negative connotation, throughout the gospel of Mark. So it seems to me that if Jesus was not about drawing crowds, then we shouldn't be either. Now, of course, he did draw crowds, he, his healing, the miracles he did naturally drew crowds, but he didn't really want them to, again, he often dispersed them. When he would do something he would even tell people now don't go and tell everybody what just happened because he didn't want the crowds he wanted to spend time, either in prayer, or time with the Father. Or he wanted to very intentionally disciple his, you know, his inner circle of followers. In a gentleman who's a wonderful author, and pastor, Carl Vaters, V-A-T-ER-S, who's written a number of wonderful things
on healthy churches and being a small church. He's got a line that I really love. And he says, Jesus never told us to gather a crowd, he told us to make disciples. So that's the thing is, what is really our focus, what are we trying to do? We're trying to make disciples, wherever we are. And I think the idea of drawing a crowd. For some of you, this is just going to almost be an impossible task. If you're in a really rural area, like, and there's, you know, 1000 people who live in your county or within 20, or 30 miles of your church, like, you're not going to get a crowd. Some of you may be in other kinds of situations, where just this notion of drawing a crowd is not going to happen, maybe you're around the corner from a mega church may have 10,000 people coming. And there's no way that you're going to, you know, really kind of be able to do something with, with, with the location you're in. So what I'm just saying is, if we say that drawing a crowd is really the standard, there's so many of us that are going to be in really difficult situations. Maybe you're live in a town that's dominated by a company or an industry, and that that industry or that company has shut down, they've left. Well, now, what are you supposed to do? I mean, how do you draw a crowd when there aren't, there isn't a crowd to draw. So kind of knowing that, I think we need to think a little bit differently. What does scripture say? I mean, in terms of what should churches do, what should churches do? What should our focus be directed towards? Well, we've discussed this already, that, instead of trying to add numbers the biblical command for the church, is to be strengthened, right, we've talked about this word sterison before about being like standing up and strong and healthy and built up. Now, we've discussed this already in some other lectures, I'm going to just touch on it really, really quickly. But if you remember in Jesus's letter to the church in Sardis, he commanded them to be strengthened, he didn't say get bigger. He didn't say get larger. He didn't say attract a crowd. He didn't say double attendance, he said, strengthen what remains in the sense of strengthening is, is indicative and kind of the other letters he sends to the churches in Revelation as well. Now strengthening can certainly include adding numbers and getting bigger. But it's, it's a way you can do that. Let's think about Paul. We've talked about him as well that Paul's ministry was certainly planting new churches. But so much of Paul's ministry was about going back to the places he had been and strengthening them. We think about Paul's letter writing another part of his ministry, obviously, a huge part of his ministry was the letters he would write. And that was to strengthen the churches. So what was Paul's focus when he was writing letters? Is there any letter that Paul wrote where, where he's telling Timothy or Titus, or you know, a community of elders? Say, You know what, guys, I've got the statistics here, and you're running a little behind, I noticed the attendance is down. You guys are trending towards. He never says it's not even like the remotest sense that Paul ever says anything like that. But he does try to strengthen the church. So what does Paul focus his energy on? He says, In Galatians, he talks to them about
you've lost the sense of the gospel, right? They were thinking the gospel was more about something that they did, rather than something that Christ did for them. They had to like add on to what Jesus was doing. And so Paul was saying, no, no, no. It's all about the work of Jesus Christ and Christ alone that, Paul, as we talked about a few lectures ago, Paul is just like making it gospel first, you know, what is the first importance, okay. That's what Paul was dealing with. There wasn't about the size of the number of people who were coming to worship in Galatia. It was that their theology was off the rails. I Thessalonians. They're disheartened, and he's so what does he do? How does he strengthen them? He encourages them. He, you know, reminds them of, you know, throughout that letter of, you know, who they are and the great testimony they have in other churches and how much Paul loves them and, and what awaits them at the end. The end of all time, and Titus, we know that there's a struggle going on there, that the work is not complete Paul sends Titus there and to install godly leadership, right? What is it? It's like they're all liers and brutes. I mean, Paul's really direct about what's going on on the island of Crete. And he says, okay, Titus, this is what you need to do, you need to get some godly leaders. And that's where we get so much of our instruction on what are the qualifications of elders and leaders in the churches. Paul, again, wasn't concerned saying, hey, Titus, I've noticed that the attendance in Crete is down 10%, he's not worried about that. He's worried that they don't have godly leaders. That was his first concern. We want to think about here in the church in Corinth, moral standards had really kind of like gone out the window. Corinth was like, even in the pagan world, Corinth was considered like as pagan as it can get. It was, it was kind of the center of prostitution and perversion, and it was just as disgusting kind of Sodom and Gomorrah kind of place. And so the Christians who are coming out of that were struggling with what does it mean to be a Christian, and coming out of that background, still living in there, and some of them did not really follow what Christ had in mind for them, they were still kind of stuck in that way of life. So Paul's like, again, he's not worrying about, you know, the last month worship attendance has been down. He's saying, you have to stop doing these things, which are of a great offense to the body of Christ, okay, they don't represent your salvation. And then just one more, we see Paul, promoting spiritual disciplines, you know, to strengthen the church, this is the sort of thing you need to be doing. So all this kind of coming together. The idea is, we look at what Paul did to strengthen the church. And that's kind of the approach I think, that we need to take. Paul was trying to strengthen the church by making the church healthier by calling it back to really what the design of the church was. And for those with the knowledge of church history, that's what the Reformation was in the 16th century, it was about strengthening the church was about pulling it back to what the Lord had designed it to be. It wasn't about the problem was not enough. People were showing up to mass. The problem was
people didn't even know what they believed. All the abuses that were going on in the church, the wrong theology, so it's a return to a healthy church. Okay. So now, the good news that we have here is that recent literature I'd say probably the last 15 to 20 years, that's probably, I'd say that's fairly accurate 15 to 20 years, there's been In a much greater emphasis on churches becoming healthy, not so much just growing and techniques on how to get bigger. Now this Church Growth Movement, it is still alive and well. I am often inundated with emails and conference, you know, flyers and stuff about if you do this, you can grow your attendance by 70%. And if you do these four steps, you know, you're gonna see the number of new visitors double and all this kind of stuff. So the Church Growth Movement is alive and well in. And I think that we need to kind of just shift and say, like, okay, that's not really what, what it's about, it's about strengthening churches and making them healthier. And I hope that's an encouragement to you. Because really, when I made the shift in my mind, about health, not growth, it really made me free from this. There's a subtext in the Church Growth Movement, that if your church isn't growing, you're a failure. And you're not being faithful in ministry. There's just, there's just that assumption that comes along with it. And like, who is loving my people, I'm trying to do my best and the church was not growing. And so it's like, I guess I'm a failure, I guess I'm disappointing the Lord, I guess I'm not honoring my call. And so moving back towards health is like, those are some things I did have more control over. And it was a more biblical approach. And that just really freed me from a sense of like, I am a disappointment in ministry. So really, the idea here with health is that we're going to follow a prescribed set of biblical principles. Okay. That's our, that's our primary focus. And if we do that, we will be more likely to, you know, achieve some kind of growth, but that the growth is the is the is the result, it's the end, it's not what we're trying to do. We're trying to get healthy. And if we get healthy, there well may in fact, be some growth. But we're not really after some set statistical outcome. Okay. Hopefully you see a difference there. So somebody who I think did a really good job explaining this as Christian Schwarz, who is the founder and the natural church development, we've talked about them with some assessments earlier on. NCD or natural church development. They've got a bunch of books and all kinds of great resources on church revitalization. And in the book, natural church development Schwarz talks about this thing called the all by itself principle. And it's based on the parable of the seed, which sprouts all by itself in Mark 4:26-29. And so what what Schwarz contends is that the church cannot manufacture Kingdom growth, it can't do it, it can't let you know, just generate that and make it happen. Rather, the church must do what it can. And trust God for the harvest, just like the farmer in the parable, you know, you can plant the seed, you can water it, you can put it in good soil, but you can't make it grow. Only God can do that. And so what Schwarz says is, if the church engages in healthy biblical practices, then God
will release divine growth forces. And it will grow all by itself. Okay. So that's, it's just this idea that the focus is on health. And if we do what we're supposed to do, chances are it's going to grow, it might not again, depending on our context, but that's not really the end goal. The end goal is that we're, we're making disciples, we're becoming healthier and stronger. Now, if you recall, from one of our very early lectures, we talked about this vitality paradigm, and this is from my friend, Harry Reeder, in his book, embers to a flame. And this is the same idea of the all by itself principle. So, in the bottom, the roots, we have a spiritual vitality, we can think of that in terms of our ways we connect to the Lord's prayer, Bible reading, quiet time, devotional, worship, the things that fill us up with the presence of God, the intimacy of a relationship with Jesus Christ that fills us with knowledge and all those kinds of things, all the ways that we kind of, are nurtured in our faith. And then the trunk is the functional effectiveness and this would be the organization and the systems that we have in the church. should make us work together. This is like the bones in our body that kind of hold things together. And so what Reeder says, is basically, if you've got good roots, and you know prayer, the word, worship, all those kinds of things. And you have a fairly good organized system, and you know what you're trying to do and you know what you're about, and you have the things in place to make it happen, it doesn't have to be fancy doesn't have to be complicated. But if you've got a good structure, you will see fruit, you'll see some kind of fruit, you know, so fruit is just the byproduct of good, good roots, and a strong trunk, just like the regular tree. If you've got bad roots, and you've got a rotten trunk, you're not going to get much in the way of fruit. But if you've got the good roots and the good trunk and strong, healthy tree, you'll probably get fruit more often than not. And so what Reeder sets up here is very similar to Schwarz's all by itself principle, you do the right thing. You set it up in the right way you create the right atmosphere, and you will succeed. Certainly, in the eyes of God, you'll succeed. And there's most likely going to be some kind of measurable growth that comes with it. But again, that's not the target. That's not the goal. The goal is health. So I'll leave you with a quote from my again, my friend, Harry Reeder, from his book, embers to a flame. And this is what Harry writes. You do not need a marketing plan to grow the church, you need a biblical fitness plan to promote its health. And you should be preoccupied, not with programs designed to produce numbers, nickels and noise, but with biblical principles by which the Holy Spirit can bring health and vitality to the body of Christ. And while statistical growth is likely to be experienced, the functional ministry of the church is the REAL TESTIMONY of spiritual vitality. So do the right things, folks. And we let the rest take care of itself. That's really where we're going. So what are the right things? Okay. Another big question. So what are the right things? What are the principles that will that really define Church Health? We're going to hit that in the next lecture really hit that right away. But first, let me just pray for you. Lord, thanks so much
for this time, we've had together today to hear Your word. Lord, release from us the burden of being failures because the numbers aren't pointing in the right direction. Yet God, do not let us be complacent and just settle for the status quo. Lord, we pray that you would drive us to seek the growth of your church for the growth and health and vitality and, Lord, we do pray that we might be a part of your kingdom in the work it is doing in this world. Lord, bless all my friends watching this, my partners in ministry, Lord, that they might have the sort of success Lord, that'll bring delight to your eyes and glory to your name. We pray this in Your name. Amen. All right, we'll come right back and we're going to talk about what are the indicators that a church is really healthy? See you then.