“I don’t even like to use the word success anymore,” commented a pastor friend at a recent meeting. “It means so many different things to people, you never know what they’re hearing when you say it.”
As we asked church leaders what they’d like to see in a LEADERSHIP issue on success, we heard the same thing over and over. Depending on who uses the word, success might mean a big salary, a private secretary, a huge organization, or faithfulness to an ideal.
But what is success for church leaders? What’s personal success? Does it mean a large, growing church? A large budget? An influential voice in the denomination? A television ministry?
And what’s a successful church? A church that’s growing in numbers? In the commitment of its members? In achieving established goals?
We asked John Huffman, pastor of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California, to assemble some church leaders from California and talk about the question. John met with Larry DeWitt, pastor of Calvary Community Church, Westlake Village; Vernard Eller, professor of religion, LaVerne College, LaVerne; Ben Patterson, pastor of Irvine Presbyterian Church, Irvine; and Peter Wagner, professor of church growth, Fuller Theological Seminary. Author Harold Fickett edited the taped proceedings.
John Huffman: What do we mean by church growth? Peter, you’re the expert; you and Fuller Seminary have turned “church growth” into a technical term. What is it?
Peter Wagner: Some people think the church growth movement deals only with churches growing larger, particularly people who try to rationalize away the problems that keep their churches from adding new members. But that’s not what is meant.
Church growth has four dimensions. In commending the church at Jerusalem, chapter two of Acts says that church growth is to grow up in our personal and corporate spiritual life; the church at Jerusalem matured in its understanding of apostolic teaching by gathering together for the breaking of the bread, prayer, and fellowship. Second, they grew together. In fact, the Jerusalem church lived together in a community; they weren’t “lone-ranger” Christians. Third, they grew out. They did not exist for themselves; they reached out into the community and performed works of charity, which in turn, created a favorable impression of the church in its neighbors’ minds. And fourth, they grew in numbers. As a result of the way those people lived, the Lord added daily to the church such as should be saved. A church that is pleasing to God grows in these four ways.
Vernard Eller: I’m glad to hear your definition of church growth, Peter; it’s balanced. But not everyone in the church growth movement has such a view. I attended a church growth seminar where the first three aspects you mentioned were totally neglected. What I heard was simply sociological advice on how to grow a big institution.
Peter: Well, you know I offer some seminars where I do nothing but give sociological advice, because that’s the seminar’s focus. But it’s not the whole story.
John: Although I’m sure you don’t mean to suggest this, Peter, you do sound as if anyone who criticizes the church growth movement must be trying to rationalize his own “failure.” I grant there might be problems in churches that don’t grow in numbers, but there also might be many things wrong with churches that are growing like wildfire.
Peter: That’s a valid statement. In the early years of the church growth movement we made such statements as, “Any church can grow.” We now know that statement to be invalid. But, I do think our methods-the state of the art-now address themselves to the complexity of the situation.
Ben Patterson: Would you say that if a church is growing in the first three ways it is reasonable to assume that growth in numbers will follow?
Peter: You can only answer that question if you examine individual cases against four factors. The first one we call national contextual factors: in a given nation, how much religious freedom is there? What is the religious context for the entire population? Second, there are national institutional factors: the kind of decisions made by the courts and by denominations. Then there are local institutional factors: the internal dynamics of the congregation itself. Finally, there are local contextual factors: the common attitudes of the people in a particular locale toward churches. In any situation, each of these factors will weigh differently, and each can encourage or inhibit growth. You can only judge the success or failure of a church to grow when these factors have been taken into account.
Vernard: But still, many people believe that if a church is growing numerically, it proves the people are experiencing the other forms of growth too.
John: Let me put that in question form. Can a church, Peter, be healthy and successful in a biblical sense and not experience numerical growth? Can a church simply maintain the status quo in membership and still be a healthy church?
Peter: No, I don’t think so. A church that is totally healthy will grow. The concept of health is the key here. People with bad colds or ingrown toenails are not totally healthy. They can still perform a range of activities, but they can’t do everything as they could without these problems. In the same way, a church that is not healthy may be performing many of a church’s functions very well, but the debility will show up in one way or another. Often, it shows up in a lack of numerical growth.
Vernard: A church that doesn’t grow may be simply sociologically unhealthy. It’s when church growth enthusiasts start drawing theological implications from sociological criteria that I get my back up. I lived in a congregation that did not grow, and I knew why. We were in competition with a big church a few blocks away, and we couldn’t put on its kind of razzle-dazzle program. But I maintain that in the Lord’s eyes, we were healthier than that church. I grant you that from a sociological perspective an institution needs to grow to be healthy. I’m not sure that is true from God’s perspective.
John: Let me cite an example to focus our thinking. I served as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Pittsburgh. For the last seventy-five years it has run about twelve hundred people on Sunday mornings. Seventy-five years with the same average attendance-that’s a long time. And there were good reasons why this was so: it is in the center of an industrial complex, very few people live within a radius of two miles, and there are two hundred United Presbyterian churches within an eleven-mile radius that compete for suburban membership. It is a very fluid situation where people come and go; it’s a church with a high turnover rate but practically no growth or decline. Is it a terminally sick church?
Peter: We would say that church is growing. For certain churches in areas of high mobility, to maintain the same membership is to grow: churches such as the one you described, others near military bases or college campuses. These churches can be very healthy, and grow, and still not show an increase in the total number of members.
John: So you’re saying what we might call “flow” is the same as growth?
Peter: Yes, for people are added to the church in three ways: through biology, transfer, or conversion. All three kinds of growth are good, but the one that makes the most difference to the kingdom of God is conversion growth. The question I would ask about the Pittsburgh church is this: Over the years, has God blessed it with conversions? And I would quantify the growth of the church on that basis rather than on the total numbers.
John: In my example there were all three types of growth. But let’s push this a bit further. How about a church in a less tenable inner-city situation than mine was in Pittsburgh. How about a church whose membership declined from 2,000 in 1960 to 800 members in 1970, and then to 400 in 1980 due to rapid demographic changes in the surrounding community. But within that twenty-year context, and despite the decline in total membership, the church has experienced all three types of growth. Would you call that a successful church?
Peter: Borderline!
Vernard: But, Peter, you’ve come full circle. You indeed are saying that if there’s no pay-off in numerical growth, then the other types of growth must not be present.
Peter: No, I’m not. I’m saying that dimensions one, two, and three can be in full operation and have no effect on number four; I’m saying the exact opposite of what you think. The four dimensions cannot be related by an equation; it’s difficult to establish precisely how they are linked. What I am saying is that if all four types of growth are not present-if God is not blessing in all four areas- there’s something wrong with the church, and something must be done.
Vernard: Okay, but I still see numerical growth as part of a sociological process, not a biblical mandate. I wrote a commentary on the Book of Revelation, and I’ll take my stand on what I found there. In the letters to the seven churches of Asia Minor, Christ looks at these congregations and assesses them. He doesn’t give them a letter grade, but it’s easy to translate what he said into school marks. Out of the seven, two get an unqualified A, two receive an unqualified F. and the three others are somewhere in between. The amazing thing is that the two small, struggling congregations get an A and the two flourishing ones get an F. Now I don’t want to invent an obverse equation in which small, struggling churches are inevitably A churches and the big, flourishing ones are in the F category. But I think it does say that to judge the basic health of a congregation simply by its numerical growth isn’t biblical.
Ben: I think, to give Peter his due, he can fit that passage into his system. The A churches in Smyrna and Philadelphia were certainly subject to the “national contextual factor” of persecution by the state. Also, one must think about time in this regard: because martyrs were willing to die for their faith at crucial historic moments, the church endured, prospered, and yes, grew. There are similar situations today, such as in Uganda and Red China, where the church is under severe pressures, yet we may expect the faith to spread in these countries because of the heroism of Christians there now.
Larry Dewitt: As I’ve been sitting here listening, two words come to my mind that I think are significant: “faithfulness,” which we have been talking about, but also “fruitfulness.” The Scriptures often speak of faithfulness through the image of fruit. In Matthew 7 it says, “Every good tree produces good fruit.” And the vine passage in John says, “My Father is glorified through your bearing much fruit.” Now these are emphatic statements, ones in which fruitfulness is almost synonymous with faithfulness. I don’t want to say only, “I’m faithful whatever happens,” but to say, “I know I’ve been faithful when I see good fruit produced, the fruit of the Spirit.” And that might mean the fruit of maturity, which Vernard seems to be insisting comes first, and it might also mean the fruit of numerical growth, which Peter stresses.
John: If we’re going to understand what church growth means and how to define “success” in relation to church growth, we have to agree about what the church is. Although we should have a fair amount of common ground, I know from your individual ministries that we might have some radical differences in our understanding of what a church is. Let’s get this matter out on the table.
We can start with a highly visible church, Robert Schuller’s Garden Grove Community Church, as the focus of the discussion. Schuller says his Sunday morning service is not a church, it’s a “ministry.” It’s a ministry to the unchurched of Orange County and the nation, who are turned off by traditional approaches. So he’s not going to talk about sin, he’s not going to do expository preaching, he’s not going to use theological language. He’s going to provide a time of inspiration by talking about possibility thinking.
He justifies this by making a clear distinction between the Sunday morning television ministry and the church proper. Schuller says that true churches have several characteristics: they evangelize, they teach, they provide community. All of these things happen at Garden Grove, but they don’t happen on Sunday mornings when the TV cameras are on. They happen on Sunday nights when Bob preaches on Romans, and they happen in adult education programs and small groups.
Now, how should we perceive what the church is and what these types of ministries are when many people only see church growth and success in Schuller’s type of ministry?
Ben: The Roman Catholic Mass is not the church, it is something the church does. Vacation Bible school is not the church, it is something the church does. Inspirational talks on possibility thinking are not the Garden Grove Community Church, but Schuller’s TV messages are one of the things that church does. It’s a total cop-out to talk about a ministry in this way, as if you thereby created a special province governed by a dispensation to the effect that anything goes.
John: I knew you four disagreed here, because in one of your books, Peter, you used the Garden Grove Community Church as one ideal model of church growth.
Peter: I think to put all of this in perspective I need to give a brief description of the theory behind distinguishing “ministries” from “churches.” We handle these questions by speaking of a “philosophy of ministry.” I see room in the kingdom of God for many different philosophies of ministry. Schuller’s is one. Schuller’s philosophy is to have a ministry strictly geared to reach the unchurched. That’s why his Crystal Cathedral is useful. His church is in Orange County, and the unchurched people there are used to Disneyland, Knotts Berry Farm, and Anaheim Stadium. Having a Crystal Cathedral with a pool down the center aisle with fountains that trigger on cue allows him to reach that audience in a way he couldn’t do otherwise. Then, after getting the people there, he leads them to Christ through other aspects of the church and builds them up in the faith.
I think we have to allow room for a diversity of ministries in the kingdom, ministries that might be even more unusual than Schuller’s.
John: But let’s return to the basic question. Can we agree on this as a working definition of the church? The church is a visible, tangible group of people who have committed themselves to God through Jesus Christ, and to each other in fellowship and mutual care. Isn’t this what the church is? It’s people. It’s not a worship service. It’s not a Bible-teaching service. It’s not a building. It’s people, committed to Christ and each other.
Larry: That’s good. I like that. And then I think each church needs to ask itself how various scriptural mandates apply specifically to it. We have the Great Commission, and we have to ask how this mandate works itself out in our situation. Our first concrete task is to clarify in our own minds what we think is the biblical purpose of our church.
We did this in our own church. We sat down and went through several passages in the Bible where Christ was talking about what he wanted to accomplish. We looked in Acts and the Epistles, where the subject was the “church.” And with three little Bible-study groups we said, “What does this passage tell us about Christ in relationship to the church? What does it tell us about our relationship to each other? What does it tell us about our relationship to the world? Then we wrote a statement of purpose for our church. We said that we are on this earth and in this church to celebrate God’s life, to cultivate personal growth, to care about each other in Christ, and to see that this is communicated to the world. We’ve enlarged on it, but in essence, that’s the mandate for our church.
Ben: I think Peter and Larry have given us good, workable definitions of the church, but I think the real problem is translating those ideas into a specific cultural setting. Culture is for us as water is to a fish: our milieu. And we Christians have done a very poor job separating the gospel from the civil religion of American culture. Many times we’ve ended up simply being a mouthpiece or a source of propaganda for the materialistic values of American society rather than the true gospel: “Be committed to Jesus Christ and you can be just as committed to your own economic expansions and to your mainstream American politics as you were before, except you’ll actually be better at getting rich, and your neighbors will think you’re a super-patriot.” The church should play a prophetic role when it becomes aware of the cultural situation, and that understanding leads to a Christian critique of the culture, whether it’s in sections of America or Africa or Asia.
Vernard: I agree absolutely. The church must be a prophetic voice.
John: Peter, in one of your books on church growth, you make a distinction between a church’s responsibility to take positions on the issues of the day and its obligation to conduct specific social action programs. You said one of the reasons for the decline of so many churches is that they became involved in political issues, and they did so in a way that precluded growth, and they were wrong for having done so. How can the church be a prophetic voice and still grow?
Peter: The church is responsible to show through its corporate life the signs of the kingdom of God. Two of these signs are redemptive cultural and evangelistic activity. Both are biblical; in fact, both go all the way back to the garden of Eden.
Vernard: What do you mean by redemptive cultural activity?
Peter: I mean moving into the world to meet people’s physical, social, and material needs; to free people from oppression; to be concerned for the poor and the hungry; to be concerned about exploitation and all the social problems that have to do with the world.
Vernard: You used the term “kingdom of God.” I think it’s essential to include an eschatological understanding of it, to perhaps use the term in a more literal way than you did. Whenever we define the church simply by what we are to do in the here and now, we have really shortened the true calling of the church. The church needs to remember always that this world is not our home, and that we are pointed towards, and citizens of, another kingdom.
Ben: Maybe we need an evangelistic-cultural-eschatological mandate, for we can have our evangelistic mandates very much intact, and we can even have a cultural mandate intact as set forth in Genesis; but if we’re not aware that this world is still guided by the principalities and powers of darkness, then we’re going to reduce the gospel to the fatuous message that “things go better with Jesus.”
John: Vernon Grounds wrote an article [see page 54] a couple of years ago in which he claimed that evangelicalism “is bowing before the bitch goddess of success. We are sinfully concerned about size, salaries, sanctuaries, and Sunday schools. We are sinfully preoccupied with statistics about budgets and buildings and buses and baptisms.” Has evangelical Christianity adopted a secular view of success that is unbiblical?
Peter: I hear a lot of talk about success along the lines of Grounds’ remarks. He uses “success” in a way that is foreign to my definition. In terms of churches, success is simply the accomplishment of goals. The pastor should ask himself, “How many people are tithing? Twenty percent? Well, let’s try to bring it up to forty percent in the next year.” If he does, God has given him success in leading his congregation into a biblical discipline. This is not “bigger is better.” It’s simply using the technique of quantification in carrying out a biblical calling for Christ’s church.
John: Is that a shift in your thinking, Peter? Bigger is not better?
Peter: No, emphatically no. Bigger is not better!
Ben: Shout that from the rooftops! Peter Wagner says bigger is not better!
Peter: Well, I’m glad to say that here. People get the notion that church growth advocates say bigger is better because most of our illustrations come from big churches. But we use big churches because they have experienced growth-they are cases in point. We’re like the biologist who studies enzymes involved with plant growth: he takes his samples at the points of a plant’s growth, and then studies how that growth is taking place.
In our classes at Fuller, we have X number of churches we do field research on. Every year I get people who say, “Hey, we need smaller churches;” so I pick smaller churches. But the churches I pick don’t stay small.
John: Peter, in the ’50s, mainline liberal churches experienced tremendous growth. Many of those same churches are now on the decline. How do you relate their numerical success to the current growth in evangelical churches?
Peter: I can’t answer you directly because as yet we haven’t developed the instruments to measure the quality of growth; but we’re working on it. It’s very important that we do, because growth can be cancerous as well as healthy-for instance, the People’s Temple of Jim Jones. That was demonic growth.
Vernard: You’re right that success should mean accomplishing biblically-based goals. But that’s not how it’s commonly used. Grounds is right in saying that success is heard in terms of salary, sanctuary, Sunday school attendance, and memberships. When the church growth movement talks about success, what comes across is “bigger is better.” I’m glad to hear you say it isn’t what you mean. But in the church growth film I saw, Hollywood Presbyterian Church and Garden Grove Community Church were lifted up as ideal models. That’s not much help to people in small, struggling congregations.
Peter: You’re right. The way you defined success is the way most people think of success. I wish we could change the thinking on that.
Larry: But hold on. One item on Vernon Grounds’ list doesn’t belong. We can define success, at least partially, in terms of baptisms: how many people are making commitments to Christ and declaring their faith through baptism? And anyway, I don’t think the church growth movement has ever defined success in terms of budgets, buses, and buildings.
Vernard: Yes, they have, Larry. One of the principles is that if you are going to grow, you have to have an attractive building with plenty of parking space.
Larry: There’s nothing wrong with that.
Vernard: No, but people hear that and think that’s success.
Peter: But, Vernard, we’re saying that if your goal is to lead people to Jesus Christ, then you have to have a place to put them. You have to have a place for them to park their cars. Now if your goal is to build people in the faith and to get them studying the Bible, you don’t need that so much.
Vernard: Let me give you another example of how success is actually used. Someone quoted Schuller as saying that his whole purpose is to reach the success-oriented people of southern California, and he does that by projecting an image of success. What does he mean by success? He means Crystal Cathedrals. He means budgets and buildings.
Larry: What is Schuller’s goal?
Vernard: We’ve said that once he gets people in, then, yes, they do get a real biblical message. But it’s false advertising.
Peter: What you’re questioning is not Schuller’s goal of wirining people to Jesus Christ and building them in the faith, but the means he has chosen. You feel he sells out too much to culture.
Vernard: Exactly.
Ben: You can’t make a distinction between goals and means; the ends don’t justify the means; in fact, the means very often vitiate the end. Can you say that whatever it takes to get people to hear the gospel is justified?
Peter: That’s a legitimate question, but it’s not a simple one, and it’s one that Christians might answer in a variety of ways. For instance, should we give kids bubble gum when they get on the Sunday school bus? If not, how is that different from taking your friend out to dinner in order to talk to him about the gospel?
Vernard: We need to hear Marshall McLuhan when he says that the medium is the message.
John: I’m glad you brought that up. As someone who worked for years in the media and prayed for the day that evangelicals would get access to the media of mass communication, I am convinced we must make McLuhanesque distinctions between what radio offered Donald Grey Barnhouse and Charles Fuller and what television offers ministers today. Radio is a hot medium that demands involvement. The old knights of the airwaves could communicate the gospel in a pretty pure form, one that really helped people come to personal faith in Jesus Christ. But television, a cool medium, controls its evangelical stars rather than the other way around. It turns them into stars in the first place by teaching them what they can and can’t say in order to remain on top.
Let me give you a personal illustration. I did a television interview show in Pittsburgh, and I had certain guests on my show because I knew they would boost the ratings. I rationalized this by thinking that with more people watching I was a more effective spokesman for God. Larry listed four characteristics of the church, and I don’t think any one of them applies to what happens between a television viewer and his set.
Ben: So you’re saying that a large part of evangelical success in the last few years is fool’s gold; that we have to distinguish between spiritual growth and television ratings.
Peter: That’s why I say it would be so helpful for the church growth movement to develop quantitative instruments to measure spiritual quality. But I also want to stand up here as one of the defenders of someone like Schuller and other television pastors who back up their mass appeals with solid church organizations. Schuller’s church has 2,000 members enrolled in a lay ministers program. That’s a course of study of 250 class hours. I’ve rarely seen a small church of fifty or one hundred people that trains members to that extent, and then commissions them to work in the church community as lay ministers of evangelism, pastoral care, hospitality, and other specialties. For example, the lay ministers of pastoral care contact between ten and fifteen designated families each month. And think of the proportion-2,000 out of 10,000 members trained in this way; 20 percent of the congregation-that’s not too bad.
Ben: How many times do we have to say this? We say the ends don’t justify the means, and then when we find out suspect means can be overwhelmingly “successful,” we start to cozy up to them. We can talk ourselves blue in the face about how corrupt liberal theology and its relativistic ways are, but when we confront relativism in our own back yard, particularly if there’s a sensational party going on back there, we join right in.
John: Here’s another quote to think about in this context. A. W. Tozer has said, “God may allow his servant to succeed when he has disciplined him to a point where he does not need to succeed to be happy. The man who is elated by success and cast down by failure is still a carnal person.”
Peter: May I respond to that one? I think Tozer is wrong. Saying you can be faithful without being successful is a serious misunderstanding of the biblical teaching of stewardship. Many of the faithfulness and success passages in the Scriptures are given by Jesus in the context of stewardship. The parable of the talents is a prime example. The servants who were faithful in this parable increased the master’s wealth; they made money, and the more the better. The servant who buried his talent was chastised. It’s our responsibility as good stewards of God’s gifts to add to the wealth of the kingdom of God, to multiply the number of people in that kingdom.
Vernard: Okay, Peter, but see what you’ve done. You’ve used your definition of success as accomplishing biblically-based goals.
Peter: That’s right.
Vernard: And I still say when you talk about success to the people of the world, they don’t hear you in terms of biblically-based goals. They don’t understand that Jesus never promised institutional success would necessarily follow faithfulness. You can’t make a parable into a magical formula with the reliability of E=mc2. We must make a distinction between the success of carrying out biblical mandates and institutional success.
Peter: I agree.
Vernard: Jesus says, “If you’re a faithful disciple of mine you’re going to meet persecution, rejection; you’re going to be pulled before synagogues and magistrates.”
You see, in one sense, in a deep sense, Jesus going to the cross was success. In the eyes of the world, though, crucifixion is exactly the opposite of what it would consider success.
John: I want to raise another issue. In Francis Schaeffer’s book, No Little People, he says, “Someone God has been using marvelously in a certain place takes it upon himself to move to a larger place, and loses his quietness before God. Ten years later he may have a huge organization, but the power is gone.” How can a pastor know whether an apparently “successful” move to a larger church is really what God wants?
Ben: Too often the clergy see professional growth as a cardinal virtue, an almost absolute goal. We tend to define professional growth in terms of Horatio Alger stories: the people who come out of seminary start with a small church and rapidly move on to bigger and bigger churches. Many feel their preaching gifts or pastoral gifts are wasted on the small church. Professionalism can be a deadly thing.
I know the pressures from personal experience. Even my family is prouder of me now that I have my own church than when I was an assistant. “Ben has done well,” they think. “He’s not an assistant in somebody else’s operation, he has his own franchise.” It’s as if they were talking about fast-food restaurants.
John: I remember when I was serving a little church in Key Biscayne, Florida. We had 280 members and I was the pastor there for six years. A veteran evangelical pastor came and visited in our church community and said, “John, don’t ever leave this church. I’ve seen too many men who have had fruitful ministries in small churches like this and then, after climbing up the ladder, they have never had the same sense of fulfillment in their larger pastorates.”
This has haunted me, because I did go from there to a church with 2,300 members, and now a church with 3,000 members, where the pressures of administrative detail rob me of some of the fulfillment that came from the intimate relationships I had with so many people in that small church.
Larry: There’s definitely a different dynamic in a large church.
John: A therapist friend of mine said something to me that troubled me even more deeply. He said that the seeds of self-destruction are within the psychological make-up of the entrepeneurial-type pastor who makes things happen and grow. He also said growth oriented pastors should reflect at the deepest level about their motivations. They need to know when they’re working for the kingdom and when they’re simply building up their own egos.
My friend cited prominent evangelical organizations founded by magnificent entrepeneurial types who, in the process of building their organizations, destroyed their own integrity and the lives of their families. Eventually, their organizations had to remove them and find a new generation of leadership that was better at administration.
Vernard: In response to that, I think we ought to bend over backwards to affirm pastors of small churches, and let them know their church and their ministry is just as valid in the eyes of God as the superstars with their colossal pastorates.
Ben: I’ve had a very personal struggle with all this. I’m now in a situation that, from a purely sociological standpoint, is going to grow. In most white, middle-class communities, about two percent of the population is Presbyterian. In our community, Irvine, it’s projected that in the next ten years there will be simply phenomenal growth. So, if we just do an average job of pastoring, Presbyterians are going to start showing up and the church is going to grow-it’s growing already.
I’ve struggled with success and church growth; I really think, on the one hand, we ought to grow numerically. There’s a lot of folks out there and not many churches, so we must reach out to the community. But half the time I don’t know what to do with the growth. I feel ill-equipped to handle it organizationally.
We had a tight group of folks at the beginning who really loved one another in Christ; because of that, the church is now four times larger than it was when we first opened up. You see, the very thing that created growth-the warm fellowship-is now threatened by what it’s produced. We can’t be that close any longer; there are simply too many of us.
Larry: I identify with that. I have a junior high son who grew eight inches last year and went through a lot of pain because of what he experienced physically. When we have growth pains, I think it’s all the more important to review goals; what you want to see happening in the lives of these people, and how you think that should come about. In doing this, we’ve developed an outline of ten steps we call people-process, and it details what we hope will happen to each person who walks through our door, from the initial encounter to the point where they’re reproducing believers.
But in the last year I’ve been scared by the amount of growth we’ve had in the worship services. I feel, as you do, Ben, that the important thing is not the rate of numerical growth; the important thing is growth that can be integrated into the total life of the church through support networks. If we don’t provide good soil for growth, we won’t have healthy harvest.
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