When was the last time someone asked you, “How large is your church?” Probably fairly recently.
Now, when was the last time someone asked you, “How healthy is your church?” Probably not very recently.
There are doubtless a pile of reasons for this disparity. However, one reason sticks out to me: we attribute success with numbers. If your church is large then it is doing something right. There something to it. There is validation due to the fact that there is a relatively large attendance.
I know some of you might already be thinking, “Here we go Erik. You are a church planter. You don’t have a big church and so you are trying to make yourself feel better. This helps you validate.”
Good question. You are both right and wrong.
Right, I am a church planter and the church is not huge. However, wrong in the sense that being relatively small validates me/us.
Too often I feel myself drifting in the stream of American Evangelicalism. I feel the pull for numbers to justify. I feel the craving to justify our existence and efforts by an attendance trends. But the problem is, attendance is not the final arbitrator of success. Instead it is faithfulness. And the measurement (or as our military friends say, ‘delta’) of our effectiveness is gospel-growth.
Whether you are a pastor or a non-elder church member, your evaluation of ministry effectiveness is not chiefly a swell in attendance but rather a swell in gospel-centeredness. Examples of such things include, men that are starting to lead their families, feel burdened for prayer, and motivated to serve; wives that desire to submit to their husbands and love their children because of the gospel and not for a bit of leverage; when single men decide, because of the gospel, to grow up (get a job, wife and some kids) and not spend their lives staring at video games but rather serving, reading the Scriptures, and being a missionary; when single women are praying for hearty gospel-saturated men to emerge for marriage, intentional involvement with older, mature women; the youth finds more pleasure with the image of Christ than the image in the mirror; when the senior saints find themselves burdened to serve and encourage the young families rather than retire to the better parking spots; when preachers begin to talk about Jesus throughout the sermon rather than just at the end; when you begin to overhear conversations that magnify Jesus and his gospel rather than just dribble the boring basketball of weather, sports, and politics. These things are examples, and there are many more (Col. 3.1-4.2).
Pastors can get caught up in a ministry arms race. We can begin to justify ourselves on apparent success and then forget about the basics of blocking and tackling, the word and prayer (Acts 6.4; 1 Tim. 4.14-16; 2 Tim. 4.2ff).
Faithfulness and gospel growth reflect health. There are some very large ministries and churches that have this. God has blessed them greatly. This is not to say you must be small to be faithful; however, it is to say that size is not the final arbitrator of faithfulness. As John MacArthur has said, “I decided early in my ministry that I would concentrate on depth and rely on God for breadth.” It is no use to be an inch deep and a mile wide.
Every now and again I need to be reminded of the profound simplicity of this calling. Otherwise I get caught up in the complex perversion of priorities which results in me regrettably taking my eye off the ball.