1.17.2009

Measuring Growth

I talked to a friend of mine last night about house/organic churches. He is in a house church himself currently. A part of our conversation that stuck out to me was when we talked about church growth. My friend believed, as do many of the current proponents of organic church, that if your church is not growing or multiplying (new churches) than the church is dead.

I think there are a few problems with this line of thinking. First of all, according to this logic, mega-churches are the most spiritually alive churches today which we know is almost the opposite of the truth. Just because a church is growing in numbers, it doesn't really tell us anything about the true growth of that church other than the fact the people like to go there.

Secondly, and more importantly, is that this line of thinking puts us right back into the traditional-church line of thinking that has put the current church in the state it's in already. People that think this way are still thinking about each church as its own entity rather than being part of the global body of believers that comprise the Church. If the global Church body isn't growing (if new people aren't coming to know Christ as their personal savior) than our individual organic/house churches can't grow. It's just not possible. Instead all we end up doing is swapping people from church to church. There is never any true growth; popular churches at the time only "steal" believers from other churches and the cycle continues.

Our churches cannot be thought of or used as our primary ministry tools. Actually they aren't meant to be ministry tools at all. Each church is a place for believers to congregate and have fellowship with each other, which has already been discussed in this blog. Our ministry to the unsaved needs to happen in our everyday lives outside of the church. Our churches are a place for them to grow after that.

I think the common analogy that the organic church proponents use when talking about church growth is that if an organic creature such as a plant doesn't continue to grow and/or reproduce then that creature is dead. This is a bit of a contrived example because not all organisms need to continuously grow or reproduce to be considered alive. Instead, think of the organic church more as like a cell (as in biology) rather than an independent organism. Each cell makes up a greater organism (perhaps a plant) that is the global Church body and we're all connected/related to each other. Each cell needs to continue to replenish and repair itself to be considered alive. Growth in the cell is not always necessarily a good thing. Especially not if it is simply taking resources from other cells to promote its own growth.

In summary, I'd like to say that I do agree with the fact that the Church body needs to continue to grow. I also believe that each organic church needs to grow as well. But measuring growth simply by numbers is inaccurate at best. There is so much that is ignored when we measure growth in this way. Somehow you would have to taken into account the relationships between each individual and God to truly measure the growth of each church. I'm not sure right now at this point how growth is to be best measured. I need some time to think about this one. I know Jason has had some thoughts on this subject as well, so maybe I'll ask him to share some of those thoughts on here.