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When Church Growth Numbers Blind Us to Deeper Truths
Numbers can be a great way for church leaders to gain objective information. They can help us quantify data, spot patterns and trends, and face harsh realities.
But information is not the same as truth.
Numbers can give us facts, but they can’t give us truth. Yet, ironically, numbers can tell us lies.
While giving us all the data we need, numbers can actually disguise deeper truths, keeping us on a dangerous path for far too long.
That happened to me and my church.
Discipleship Looks More Like Sacrifice Than Success
I’ve chosen to be a follower of Jesus. A disciple. From the moment I did that, I gave up ownership of my life.
My life is no longer mine. It’s his. So my goals don’t matter anymore. My potential is not enough. Not for me, my church, my family or my ministry.
I don’t want my best. I want God’s best. Because his best is so much better than my best.
Of course that’s what so many of these self-help gurus are claiming. That, whatever my dreams for my life are, God has 10 or 100 times more than that for me. (The really holy ones will use old-timey bible terms like 10-fold and 100-fold).
But the difference between my best and God’s best for me is not a matter of scale. It’s not that I’m asking for 100 and God wants me to ask for 1,000 or 10,000. Getting more of what I want is not God’s best, it’s just more of my best.
How To Give Money Less Power Over Your Church
Money is in charge of too many of our churches.
We all know about the (so-called) churches, ministers and ministries that are in it for the money, while using their religious exemption to avoid taxes. Those aren’t the ones I’m talking about. I’ll leave them to the Lord and the IRS. (Thankfully, those are far more rare than the anti-church cynics want to believe.)
I’m talking about good churches that want to do great ministry, but their limited finances cause them to make too many decisions based on what they can or can’t afford, instead of what God is calling them to do.
It’s a trap too many good churches find ourselves in. Maybe yours.
There are no easy answers, but in today’s post I want to tell you about a decision my church made over two decades ago that has been a great starting point in allowing us to follow God more and money less.
When Is a Bigger Church a Better Church?
I love big churches. I think they’re great.
Obviously, I love small ones, too.
Because I minister to Small Churches, I’m often asked, “aren’t you worried, that by supporting Small Churches you’ll be encouraging churches that could grow, to stay small instead?”
Yes. That is a concern. One that I’ve addressed in The Grasshopper Myth and in several posts including, Small Churches Are Not a Problem, a Virtue or an Excuse.
But I also have to answer that question by asking one of my own. It’s one that’s almost never considered. Namely, “aren’t you worried, that by supporting individual congregational growth, you’ll be encouraging churches that should stay small, to get bigger instead?”
I know. It’s weird to even read that question, isn’t it?
Before we go any further, let me state again that I’m not against church growth. I very much support it as an essential element in fulfilling the Great Commission. But as I wrote in, Are You Serious about Worldwide Church Growth? Support Small Churches, true church growth (that is, as a percentage of the population) doesn’t always mean bigger churches. Sometimes it means a whole lot of smaller ones.
The Church Stewardship Prime Directive: Don’t Spend More Than You Bring In
Today’s post isn’t long, because today’s point is very simple.
When it comes to the issue of Money & the Small Church, (or money & big churches, money & family finances, money & business, etc) there is one principle that stands high above all the others.
It’s so basic, I almost feel silly having to write it.
I call it the Church Stewardship Prime Directive, because I believe there is no financial principle more important for a church to observe than this.
Don’t spend more money than you bring in.
That’s it.
Maybe it’s because this principle is so basic and commonsense, that it’s often taken for granted, and therefore ignored. And it’s always a problem when we do.
My 6 Best Tools for Overcoming Preacher’s Block
I’ve been preaching for thirty years.
Thirty years of creating new content every week for 45-50 weeks of the year. For the first fifteen years I was preaching or teaching three times a week – on Sunday morning, Sunday night and a mid-week bible study.
It all adds up to over 3,000 preaching/teaching events in thirty years. An average of two per week.
At some point I have to run out of things to say, don’t I? Actually, at hundreds of points I have run out of things to say.
If you’re the preaching/teaching pastor of a local church, you know the feeling. The Saturday night dread. The “what am I going to say this week that they haven’t all heard 100 times before?” panic.
It still happens to me. I guess I’m a slow learner.
The good news is, it doesn’t happen to me nearly as much as it used to, because over the last three decades I’ve learned a few tricks – what computer geeks would call hacks, but we’ll just call tools – that reduce the pressure and make Preacher’s Block a little less frequent.
Money & the Small Church: 3 Reasons We Can’t Ignore It
Not having enough money is a huge problem in life and in ministry. Yet it’s just the way things are for the Small Church – and for the Small Church pastor.
But helping those who are in even greater need than we are is one of the primary callings of the church.
It’s one of the few things every Small Church has in common.
How do we do more ministry with so little money?
Because of my intense dislike of money, I have written very little about it in the two year life-span of NewSmallChurch.com. But it’s probably the subject I’ve been asked about more than any other.
I haven’t intentionally avoided writing about it. I just feel woefully inadequate to present myself as some kind of expert on the subject.
But in more than thirty years in ministry, I’ve been forced to learn about it – especially in the last half decade or so.
So, despite my misgivings – or maybe because of them – I plan to write several posts on the subject of Money & the Church in the next few weeks. Then we’ll come back to this series on a regular basis.
Why My Church Is Better at 200 than It Was at 400
There are a lot of reasons why the church collapsed and nearly folded. But the main one was this. The pursuit of numbers made us sick. And sick things start to die.
I’m grateful that our sickness was evident in our shrinking numbers. It forced us to deal with the problems. Some churches start dying internally, but keep getting bigger externally, so they don’t see their sickness. No, not all of them. Not even most of them. But some of them. Including mine.
Through that process, I learned several painful lessons. I’m grateful for every one of them.
The Problem With “The Problem With the Church Today…”
When people complain that today’s church services aren’t as good as they should be, that our worship is often more about entertainment than participation, that the preaching is often shallow, that discipleship is sometimes non-existent… I have to reluctantly agree.
When they long for the days when we did church better than we do it today… I wholeheartedly disagree.
We’ve never done church better than this.
Sure there have been pockets of greatness. There still are today.
And there are always good, healthy churches to be found of all shapes and sizes. I’ve been in a lot of them and I pastor one.
But the less-than-ideal church service is nothing new.
