Lord, Save Us...

My co-pastor and I were working with a church recently, talking about church growth, plateaus, difficulties in growth, etc.  We said, "We often ask the wrong question, which is: What can we do to grow the church? We need to ask the right question: What is preventing the church from growing?"*

You see, we often focus on doing things to grow the church - strategies, gimmicks, programs, whatever - things that other churches have done, books have said will work, ideas we've dreamed up or something else that we think might grow the church numbers.  Some things work, some things don't.  The core thing that is guaranteed to grow the church is the movement of the Spirit of God, but we don't control that.  What we DO control is how we act.

And that is the question we were asking.  What do we do that prevents people from coming to church?  And there's a lot.  We act...badly.  I read a book called Lord, Save Us From Your Followers that tries to answer some of those questions, and the book Jim and Casper Go To Church, as well as a book called When Bad Christians Happen to Good People and particularly the Lyons/Kimmel book unChristian - lots of research, anecdotes and observations about, particularly, the bad and the ugly of church life.

What we do badly...should we pay attention to that?  I think we should.  How we mis-represent Christ is probably as telling as how we represent Him.  How we are unChristian is as powerful a testimony as how we are Christ-like.

And so the prophetic words of a saint in a church, when faced with the question of "Why isn't the church growing?" were thus:

"People outside the church look in and see what's going on in here and they don't want anything to do with it.  They see the fighting and what the people in the church say and do, and they don't want to be a part of that."

And that church has a lot of work to do, a long way to go to reach the community.  But they realize that there's a lot of history, some of it bad, some of it painful, some hurts they've caused.  And it is a difficult, but very healthy, realization to come to.  Just like it is for all our relationships.  Where we have caused hurt, we need to bring healing.  Where we have been wrong, we need to make amends. 

Been burned in church?  What does the church need to do better?









*Yeah, I know, not original, and not the MOST IMPORTANT QUESTIONS to ask in the grand scheme of things... but in the context, it was important...roll with it...