Church growth rant

I continue to find that students come to seminary with certain (misguided) assumptions about churches. A popular one is the assumption that the goal of ministry is to grow a congregation numerically, that is, to work at increasing the membership of a church. When asked, most of them will cite the Great Commission (Mt. 28:19-20) passage as the driving rationale for this (for many pastors in congregational ministry, that rationale seems to be perpetuated by their denomination and the kinds of “ministry leadership” books and literature they tend to read and conferences they attend. This seems to be true for most denominations, from evangelical to mainline, in my observation).

When Jesus gave the Great Commission he said, “Go into all the world and make disciples.” He didn’t say, “Go and establish congregations and growth them as large as you can.” When Jesus made that statement there were no congregations as a reference point of making disciples. In other words, he did not charge his disciples to “make members,” but rather, to “make disciples”; followers of Christ, in whatever setting they happened to be. The settings contemporary to Jesus’ command were tribal, ethnic, and culturally diverse (Greek, Roman, Hebrew, as well as that intriguing list found in Acts chapter 1: Parthians, Medes Elamites, Mesopotamians, Judeans, Arabs, Cretans, Cappadocians, and those from Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, Libya, and Rome).

To use the Great Commission as a mandate to grow a congregation numerically is an unwarranted exegetical leap of the hermeneutical imagination.

When the Apostles and Jesus’ disciples followed up on the Great Commission, they did not go out and establish congregations. They made disciples of people in their cities, tribes, families, and communities within their own culture—most of which seemed to have been familial and tribal groups. It may be worth remembering that the poorest, and perhaps smallest, of the first churches was the church in Jerusalem (the “home church” of Christianity). It struggled so that the Gentile churches outside of the birthplace of the Church sent an offering to help the “mother church.”

If a congregation wants to grow numerically, or intentionally go about institutional development as part of their local vision, then that’s all well and good. Go for it, I say. But be honest in saying that this is YOUR vision for your congregation. And be humble enough to confess that what is YOUR vision may not be equivalent to God’s intent. Claim your vision for a larger congregation, that is your privilege, but do not insist that there’s a “biblical theology” behind it, or a biblical mandate for it, or that it is the norm and the logical and necessary thrust of a congregation’s mission. To claim so is dishonest. To claim God insists so, or that to fail to grow is a failure to obey the Bible lacks integrity. To make faithful ministers and church members of small congregations feel guilty and like failures, to hint that they as less than a “real” church because they happen to be small is sinful.

The fact of the matter is that for all the hype about large churches, the majority of congregations in the United States (well over half) have less than 100 members. That challenges us to consider that the “norm” for the congregational form of Church is the “small church,” not the “large congregation” as often popularly assumed. As I argue in The Hidden Lives of Congregations, that resistance to grow numerically is probably natural given the fact that the nature of congregations is that they are authentic expressions of a “community of faith.” I think a more theological (if not biblical) understanding of “growing churches” is about planting new churches (multiplication), not growing an existing church larger numerically (enlargement).