I am not a church growth guru but I know people who are. Some of them are impressive people who look to build the Kingdom others are not.

Growing you church is not about you, it's about the Kingdom of God. If your heart is to increase numbers to justify your new building plan, raise your status as a pastor or use those numbers as a measuring stick then I'll ask you to stop reading and pray for God to reveal to you His Kingdom purposes for your ministry and His goals for your church.

There is a correct size for your church and it is not the same as the church across the road, the city or the country. The size of your church is defined by it's context, pastor, community and it's willingness to serve.

• Context and community: A country town of 200 people will probably not grow a church of 2000 (or even 200).
• Pastor: The growth of the church will be limited by the willingness of those in control to part with that control as growth occurs and to cast a vision of the incarnational Kingdom in your community.
• Willingness to serve: The desire of the church to be the Church will determine it's reach and influence.

If God is looking to build you into the pastor of a mega church, may He bless you. If his desire is for you to consume that country community into a community of believers then may He bless you there. If your to lead an incarnational community of house churches and small groups then may He bless you there as well.

Whatever the shape, church growth is about honoring where you are and the limits imposed on you.

Some people say, "It's all about the numbers", and they are right. So too are those who say "It's about people, not numbers". We reconcile this by concentrating on growing people into a community of believers not numbers on a growth chart. If you can agree on that, then we are well on our way to discovering the barriers to church growth that are internal and external to our ministry.

Following on from The church with no programs. I concluded with the following challenge:

    What would your church look like if you stopped every single program? What would rise up and fill their space? Some of the old which was valuable may well reappear but I would bet next weeks collection it would emerge totally different, and something that honours God where you are, with what you have and blesses the community around you.

Over a period of many years I have read at least 50 books on church leadership, management and growth. They all had great ideas, some could even be used in a context apart from the one they originated. (aside: don't dig into that point, I have a big problem with church leadership books and the people who read them and try to make them work in absurdly different circumstances.)

However none of it really hit home until somebody asked be the question: "If you church disappeared tomorrow, would anyone notice?"

Well, would anyone miss yours? Most of the congregation would probably be happy with a free Sunday. Now that's not a joke, I was talking to the leader of a nearby church this morning and he told me how great it was since they closed their night service. He get's to spend a lot more time with friends and family. Long lunches with friends turn into long evenings. He doesn't want to start going back to the night services.

That single question used to drive how I approached ministry (I think I blogged about it a while ago but I can't remember) until the question was redefined for me by Rob Bell.

This is not a direct quote but it's  pretty close. Rob asked: "If your church was forced to close down tomorrow, who would protest?"

I'll give you a pass on the church members (their a given except for my friend above). This question puts a beautiful spin on the original, it opens us up to consider our wider community and their needs. Would our neighbors notice that the church had been closed? Will our community miss our impact as far as social justice and helping the poor is concerned?

What are we doing in our church that will be protested if we are forced to move on?

I recently finished a short book called "Jesus Wants to Save Christians: A Manifesto for the Church in Exile" by Rob Bell.

I have to say, it left me both hungry and satisfied. For over a year I have had the thought that the church today is something akin to the nation of Israel in exile. In a macro way it has swapped natural for unnatural and become not just of the world but worldly in everything it does.

Now that's a big call and I guess what I'm saying is that the church (not specifically Christians) has become something that it was not supposed to be. It has swapped it's dynamicism of the past for something tried and true and in most churches I have been associated with, the majority of the energy goes into maintenance. maintenance of the buildings, the mortgage, the programs, the rosters. All of the things that should be peripheral have become central which pushes the important things from our grasp.

Such thoughts will not be new to you if you have been reading this blog over the past year, but reading the book helped bring some of my thoughts into focus and I'll be writing about these over the coming months.

Today I am going to start at the outcome. What does a church in exile look like? The correct answer is whatever shape God ordains for where and when you are. Whatever shape, structure and resources make sense in your context but not simply shape, structure and resources maintained from the past.

Although it was quite a rough ride to be expelled from their homeland and into captivity (more than once), exile for the Jewish nation help to sharpen their focus as well as build their reliance on God. I wonder what would happen to most churches I know of if they were physically exiled from where they stood, not just exiled from the mainline of society? How would that sharpen their focus, would it?

When I heard the call of God to move from the church I was serving and to go to another church I considered a nearby congregation whose pastor had also just moved on. This was (and still remains) a troubled church. Most of their 50 strong congregation is over 70, there is one young family, but what they do have is their building, and they work hard to keep it.

I had a very informal chat with this church and put it to them that if I was to be called to serve there, the first thing I would do would be to shut down every single program they have and keep them shut down for at least 3 years. Its a radical idea, but my feeling at the time for them was that they needed to rediscover who they were at a church now and not perpetuation who they were as a church 30 years ago. (Who knows, they might even sell the building and give the money to the poor).

What would your church look like if you stopped every single program? What would rise up and fill their space? Some of the old which was valuable may well reappear but I would bet next weeks collection it would emerge totally different, and something that honours God where you are, with what you have and blesses the community around you.

A great deal of my time recently has been given over to the contemplation of church as an activity. In the last month on three seperate occasions, people (all couples but I don't think that's causal) have told me that they have given up going to church because to varying degrees they do not see a point in it.

These are all people who love God wholeheartedly but have been disenfranchised in congregations that see their value as their abilities and not as fellow children of God.

It gives me reason to pause when I hear something like this and it should cause you to pause as well.

Why does a congregation exist? That seems to be the root of all of this. I know that many people are not fans of the institutional church and are looking to the emerging and missional movements to find something new and exciting, I count myself among them, but surely the institutional church as we know it is not evil.

If it were evil (as defined by actively opposing peoples relationship with God) then I would be the first with the flamethrower and pitch fork calling for them to be closed down. I do not believe the institutional church to be inherently evil but they have in many cases become misguided.

This sounds a little contradictory but I'm both a supporter and detractor of the institutional church. Actually, I just don't like the institutional part. Let me unpack that a little with some more definitions.

We call pretty much any church with 4 walls and people institutional. I believe that is unfair. An institutional church in my mind is one that has become institutionalized. One that exists purely to perpetuate it's existence.

IBM, one of the worlds biggest computer companies and largest employers had this problem not that long ago. They were BIG BLUE, everyone came to them to have their problems fixed. After a while they just seemed to stagnate. Their products were no longer innovative, they did not take the industry lead and as a consequence they were overtaken by smaller rivals. IBM it seems existed just to be IBM, they were no longer a business to help people.

Sound familiar? Institutionalized churches are like IBM, they were once vibrant communities of faith and healing but somewhere along the line they looked inwards and started to plan for maintenance and not growth.

IBM seems to be back on a growth trajectory but it took many years, a lot of pain and introspection and real LEADERSHIP to turn things around.

The same is needed for the church.

One of my favorite pieces of Scripture is "Without a vision, the people perish". It is our responsibility as leaders of God's church to be focused on his mission and share with our congregation how we are going to accomplish that in our context. That is vision. All else is secondary to the Fathers mission. The building, lobbying government, the music everything is secondary to the mission. They are often important, but I will say it one more time. They are secondary to the mission.

Here are some hard questions for you church leader:

 * What is your churches number one focus?
 * Do you have a vision statement?
 * Does it fulfill the great commission?
 * Are you able to measure if it's working?
 * Are you making an idol out of anything secondary?

 

I've just published another article / deep thought which takes a look at missional communities in history and tries to draw out of their experience something that we can take forward for today's missional/emerging church.

Comparion of Missional movements in history attempts to deconstruct the Piest movement of early Protestantism as well as the monastic movement from it's 3rd century roots and compares their distinctive characteristics, features, strengths and weaknesses in their historical contexts. By looking at how each was caused, shaped and affected we can learn more about missional living and leadership today.

I hope you learn something from reading it because I did writing it. There is truly nothing new under the sun as far as "doing church" goes and we have a lot to learn about community and involvement in the lives of others from these movements in the past.

A few months ago a woman came into our church and made the pronouncement that she would never return to our church, would never again grace us with her presence unless we took all the flags down off the walls. To keep us continually focused on missions we have flags from all the nations that we support missionaries or orphanages or churches (or whatever else) in hanging from the walls.

For me, it was one of the first tests of leadership in the church, what should we do? Did we listen to this woman who spent most of that morning getting in peoples ears about how the flags were evil and signs of Satan or did we stay the course and leave it as a focus?

We decided to leave the flags there because we believed that the opinion of one should not dictate to the majority (that is of course unless they are right, but that wasn't the case here).

Today I was confronted with a similar situation, before our night service tonight I was confronted by an older member of our congregation who proclaimed that I should never lead worship unless I was wearing shoes. Her argument was that as a leader I should do whatever it takes to remove and all barriers for people in our church, so even if one person complains we should do what they say.

Do you think this is reasonable? Let's put aside what you think about the actual issue here, I don't wear shoes because I don't like wearing shoes, I wear thongs (or flip-flops depending of where you live) and slip them off whenever I can. (That and the fact I have nerve damage in my hands and feet and shoes hurt.)

Do you think it is reasonable for the objection of one person to set the policy and standards of the church? The Apostle Paul did say that he endeavored to become all things to all men in order to save a few but there are obvious problems with this when you become a Jew to save some and a Gentile to save others.

Situations such as this need to be measured firstly against Scripture, does God care about this matter and if not, against a reasonableness test. Is it reasonable to hold an entire group of people to the standards of one person in this case? If they are a reflection of a larger opinion in the church and it doesn't hurt to do it then just do it. If however it is the opinion of just one person or a small group of people, why put ourselves in bondage to their whims? This week it's making sure your wearing shoes, next week it's wearing a suit when you preach even in 40 degree heat!

It's easy to laugh at these things but these things no matter how trivial do matter to people so when you are dealing with situations such as this make sure you do it in love. If you treat these situations flippantly or with disdain or the person without respect these imaginary emergencies and worries can turn into real hurt and pain.

When I first started studying theology for ministry I had no idea what I would learn. A mentor of mine at the time said that going through college dried him out and nearly burnt him out and told me to be very weary of it all. His fear was that my fresh conversion zeal would be sapped away by constant study as was his.

My experience of study has been quite the opposite, although it's tiring getting all the assessment work completed and trying to balance work, study, ministry and life, I find that I am energized by the company of great minds who have thought deeply and inspire my own deep thoughts.

Study has made parts of Scripture come alive, have new meaning and deliver a depth of meaning that I would have never encountered simply sitting in a pew.

One of those times occurred while reading "Theology for the community of God" which introduced me to the theology of the Trinity, how it works, why it is important and the consequences of having a God who lives in community with Himself.

The textbook brought me back to the fundamental nature of God, God is love.

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.
God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.

We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

John 4:7-21

When we say that God is love we sometimes seem like we are reading a bumper sticker, it's the right next to the "In case of rapture this car will be unmanned" sticker. But what we are conferring is the fundamental cause of the universe, God is love, and out of that love we came.

God is love.

God = love.

John in the passage above says it 6 ways from Sunday that when we love we are showing God to the world. When we speak of love we are speaking of God and the things of God.

In mathematics such as algebra you can substitute certain symbols to mean something else.

For example:

x = a + b

y = 5 * x

Therefore

y = 5 * (a + b)

Think this one through with me.

I'm seeking love = I'm seeking God.

I want to experience love = I want to experience God.

I want to know love = I want to know God.

When we seek love, we seek God.

For some of us this may re-invigorate our relationship with God because we know something about love and so we can start applying this to God. We can look at the hearts of our parents, or the love we have for our children and we get something of a glimpse of what this means with a relationship with our Heavenly Father.

For me it grows in me the desire to grow in holiness in my relationships. To love someone deeply means to impart something of the things of God into their lives. When I seek to serve the lost, the hopeless and the unloved in my community, the people who don't have a job, live on welfare, smell, when I minister to them to show them the things of God what I am really trying to do is show them love.

If I have not loved them then I have not shown them God.

I was worship leading this Sunday morning, one of my favorite things in the world. The service was excellent, the songs, prayer, communion and message where all consistent and filled with the Holy Spirit but...

... at the end of the service no one came forward for prayer.

Typically we have about 5-10% of the congregation come forward for some one on one ministry at the end of the service but this week there was no one. At the time I was a little thrown, questions circled in my mind like "what had I done wrong?" but after some time I have come to the realization that I didn't do anything wrong, it's just that no-one came forward for prayer and ministry.

So great service, no response. What do we do with that?

With some reflection I've identified a couple of issues that bear fleshing out.

Consistency. We have a dedicated team of people who pray and minister after the service consisting of any of the Elders in that service plus some ministry heads (pastoral care, prayer etc) who have hearts to be involved in peoples lives and let them know how much God loves them. This week half of this team were away on holidays and I get the feeling that if they were there certain people would have been drawn out for prayer.
We can call that a good and a bad thing for the obvious reasons. It's good that people bond and trust each other but you can't base your whole life on one person always being available to you, that's why we are one body with many parts.

The next point of reflection is expectation.

Some people might read this and think that I'm crazy, stupid or plain ungodly for expecting that there would be people who will come up for prayer. I strongly disagree with that sentiment because if we do not have a point, purpose or expectations on our meeting together then it will be an essentially aimless affair.

Our morning services are geared towards a response from the message (motivation for change), healing and growing in Christ. Nothing wrong with that but the church down the road may have a completely different goal of say people signing up to work in the community, another church may have the call for greater participation in church life. Contrast to our night services where we do not have a clear aim or goal, we run listlessly from idea to idea and wonder why nothing is working.

Whatever the goal we should be clear minded and focused on it because consistency in what we do brings the freedom for people to participate each week and the freedom to not.

Community starts at home? Maybe that's not atomic enough, community starts with the individual.

Whaaat? How does that work? Community by it's very definition has to involve more than one person so how can it start with the individual?

The weekend just gone the Eldership of my church (which I am one of) went on retreat to pray, reflect and discuss God's direction for His church in the coming year. I think we all went in with some fairly clear ideas about what 2009 will look like but by the time we were done God had turned it all on it's head.

If you are a member of my church, you should probably skip the next couple of paragraphs, it contains spoilers for next year :)

God's agenda for our church seems centered around the statement "Being in community. Being of community" which is to say we are committing ourselves to growing our church in community with each other (as well as those who walk through our doors) as well as committing ourselves to growing in further outside of our church walls into the greater community.

The basis for all of this community building are small groups with the stated goal of "Being a church of small groups, not a church with small groups". That doesn't mean adopting a cell church model but rather seeking to make community a part of the DNA of our church. When someone new joins, the goal is to have them plugged in with a small group who will then become the primary mode of pastoral care and support.

The Holy Spirit was quite convicting when this vision took form in front of us, out of my own mouth I heard the challenge to us as a leadership to be practicing this form of community that we had been discussing for the rest of the church because if we were not able to practice and demonstrate it how could we expect the rest of our congregation too?

So why does community start with the individual, because the individual must make a conscious decision to open their life up to those around them even if those openings may invite pain or conviction. (Although in my experience it has always brought more joy than anything).

Community is not something that can be tough, it can only be shown. In fact we have the greatest example of community in God. As a Trinitarian being he is in constant community with himself and at his very nature he is love.

If we want to grow a God-like community, a royal priesthood of believers than we can do no better than taking a leaf out of God's book on this on.