If a church’s source is God’s Life, then it will grow and reproduce. God’s plan has always included the dominion mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.” (Gen 1:28). Why? Because we live by LIFE, and that was God’s intention in the beginning.
Church growth isn’t necessarily Kingdom growth.
When you hear “church growth,” the typically assumption is that is simply numerical, as in the number of people gathering together.
Kingdom growth is different. It is numerical, but it’s also spiritual and in cultural impact.
There are plenty of ministries where you could turn over the rocks and find a lot of unhealthiness. But if there’s a great speaker and band, then they may attract thousands and thousands of people.
Kingdom growth is when more people don’t just claim that Jesus is King, but they live like it together (you can’t do that individually).
How do living things grow?
When you think about how living things grow, it’s really about being in the right environment and removing hindrances to growth. In the case of a plant, it may be adequate water, soil and sunlight, as well as removing weeds.
Common hindrances when it comes to church life include spiritual disunity, immorality, false doctrine, unbiblical traditions and individualism. These are all things that can get into a church’s life together, either at the beginning or infiltrating as time goes on.
If you look at the letters written to churches in the New Testament, they were dealing with this stuff. Things were going on that were hindering growth.
Letters would typically start off with the “nutrients” of the truth of the gospel and the church’s new identity in Christ. Then they would address hindrances, saying something like “because this is true, therefore you should think and act this way because that is who you are.”
As those things happened, the Kingdom would grow.
In the New Testament, you see a pattern to Kingdom growth.
There is a pattern that is a good indicator for church health. If this is our focus, if it’s what we’re doing the work for, if it’s what we’re a part of a church for, then it’s a really good signal of church health. If we’re getting outside of this, it can be an indication of some unhealthiness.
There’s 4 steps to the pattern…
Step 1: Telling the good news
This is the Gospel of the Kingdom, not just the Gospel of Salvation. It’s not just accepting Jesus as Savior. It’s also accepting Him as Lord and living like it in close-knit community with others. You’ve been saved to become a part of a people that makes the Kingdom of God visible.
In the New Testament times, an apostle would go into a city, share that message, people would convert, and they’d join congregations to live out the reality of the Kingdom of God.
Step 2: Multiplying congregations
The first apostles weren’t really concerned with reaching a certain amount of people. They were concerned with raising up a Kingdom community in a city that could then evangelize the city. They weren’t looking to get thousands of people to follow them.
As the communities grew, they would multiply into more communities. This was typically at around 30-50 people depending on their specific context. (A good rule of thumb for this is to multiply when a group has trouble keeping close-knit community relationships with everyone.)
Structure is going to follow function. Determine how you want to function first, then structure yourselves in a way that allows you to function that way.
Kingdom growth is being fruitful and multiplying.
Step 3: Being built together
Peter wrote “you also, as living stones, are being built up as a spiritual house.” (1 Peter 2:5)
Living stones becomes the walls of a house. They are chiseled and formed in ways they can be fit together so there are no cracks or holes in the walls. This is a process that takes time, commitment and agony. That’s what it takes to be built into the human temple that God wants to live in by His Spirit.
Step 4: Exercising spiritual gifts
The Leader of the community is Jesus Christ by the Holy Spirit through everyone. Biblical churches are Spirit-led communities that weren’t led by specially-selected humans. They were led by the Spirit through a community of humans.
Yes, it’s challenging. This is why Israel asked for a king when God wanted them to be a kingdom of priests. A church is a group of people where everyone is a priest. Therefore, there are no human leaders.
That doesn’t mean there isn’t leadership. There is! It’s by Spirit through each person’s gifts as the New Testament teaches.
We tend to make this more complicated than it needs to be. If we had a family and there was something we wanted to do, like build a barn, who should take the lead? Probably the person with the most knowledge, experience and talent with building things.
Having a family where one or a few people are always taking the lead makes no sense.
Leadership in the Body of Christ notices the task at hand and what is demanded in any particular moment or season and then those that have been specially empowered will lead in those tasks.
You could call these 4 things the “life-cycle” of the Body of Christ.
A church can get fatter, but not healthier.
Here’s what Howard Snyder said in his book The Community of the King about Kingdom growth…
The tendency to build large local churches, with the accompanying inevitable institutionalism, bureaucracy and emphasis on buildings, is too easy. The subtle temptation to imitate secular models such as government, the shopping mall and the university becomes overwhelming, and the church slips into institutionalism, with the rigidity, impersonality and hierarchy that go along with the package.
(Author) In Sik Hong warned that huge churches can easily become “power centers” that inevitably create their own “peripheries.” He wrote, “The Trinitarian concept of God rejects the idea of the creation of a power center”; the triune model is instead one of intercommunication and interconnection. “Rather than planting megachurches that create just such a monopoly of power,” he wrote, we should build “ecclesiastical communities that are networked together in intercommunication.”
In living things, normal growth comes by multiplication—by cell division, not by the unlimited expansion of existing cells. The growth of individual cells beyond a certain point is pathological; normal growth requires that they divide.
If the church can grow only as fast as buildings are built or pastors are academically trained or budgets are expanded, then growth is limited to the resources available for these purposes.
It’s healthy to be careful about imitating secular models of human relationships. Instead, we need to focus on building Spirit-led communities.
Michael Fleming
Mike Fleming is the creator of Finding Healthy Church. Over 20 years ago, he was sparked by the frustration of failing to experience what the biblical story claimed a healthy church was like. He caught a vision and passion for seeing local churches be what they were designed by God to be. He shares what he's learning along the way so the health of local churches around the world are improved. He’s currently working on an eye-opening book that will help better understand what it means for a church to be healthy.