As a Pastor, Did You Use Church Growth Strategies?

00:00:00.000 | We have a leadership question for you today.

00:00:03.520 | Hello, Pastor John, in your time as a pastor at Bethlehem Baptist Church, over all those

00:00:08.400 | 30 plus years, did you ever use strategies aimed at church growth?

00:00:13.260 | How would you counsel pastors and churches who seek to grow numerically and reach more

00:00:16.980 | people while doing so in the most biblically faithful way possible?

00:00:21.800 | How would you answer this leadership question, Pastor John?

00:00:24.240 | I'm really happy for this question because I don't think we've tackled this in all the

00:00:31.200 | 900 plus.

00:00:33.040 | I tried to communicate to our people continually that in view of the glory of Christ, His purpose

00:00:40.640 | is to be magnified in the world through believing people, the vast lostness of millions and

00:00:46.640 | millions of people near and far, the horrors of hell, the beauties and the power of the

00:00:54.600 | gospel, the nature of love, the truth that it's more blessed to give than to receive.

00:00:59.240 | I tried to communicate in view of all that, not rescuing perishing people is not an option

00:01:07.720 | for us.

00:01:09.440 | It's also not possible for us since only God can raise the dead and open the eyes of the

00:01:17.480 | blind and take out stony hearts of unbelief.

00:01:21.200 | So our first strategy of growth was prayer.

00:01:26.360 | I tried to create a culture of desperation for all the things that matter most, which

00:01:32.800 | are the ones that only God can do.

00:01:35.680 | Christians can't do it, evangelists can't do it, pastors can't do it, friends can't

00:01:39.320 | do it.

00:01:40.760 | We scattered prayer meetings all through the week besides encouraging families and small

00:01:46.200 | groups to pray and individuals, of course, to pray for the impossible goal of getting

00:01:53.440 | sinners through the eye of a needle, which only God can do that miracle.

00:02:00.500 | We also knew, however, that faith comes by hearing.

00:02:05.840 | So not sharing the gospel with a view to seeing people believe and be saved and be part of

00:02:11.880 | God's family forever was not an option for us.

00:02:15.960 | The term "church growth," however, had connotations for us that were not so good,

00:02:25.640 | at least in the circles in which I function and my people.

00:02:29.980 | So much depends on where the accent falls when you talk about church growth.

00:02:37.040 | Abuses of pragmatism, minimization of theology, dilution of the gospel, dumbing down of serious

00:02:45.240 | joyful worship in a way that came to be known as "seeker-sensitive."

00:02:50.680 | All these things were associated in our language with the church growth movement, which is

00:02:57.580 | sad because there's nothing wrong with growing.

00:03:02.480 | In fact, I wanted to say we must pursue growth.

00:03:06.760 | But in that context, my suggestion to pastors is that you use biblical language constantly

00:03:17.400 | to permeate your people's minds with something other than catchphrases that are in seminars

00:03:23.840 | like "church growth."

00:03:26.680 | The great challenge is not to become a bigger and bigger church, but to see more and more

00:03:31.160 | people escape the wrath of God.

00:03:34.000 | Ask your people that.

00:03:35.320 | If they say, "Oh, I don't know if that church growth stuff is biblical," say, "How about

00:03:39.480 | escaping wrath?

00:03:41.120 | Is that good?"

00:03:42.120 | So you put it in categories like that.

00:03:45.160 | Ultimately, it didn't matter whether the people who escaped wrath through faith in

00:03:50.760 | Jesus went to our church or not.

00:03:53.480 | That's quite secondary.

00:03:55.040 | What ultimately mattered was in every community, are people hearing the gospel?

00:04:00.800 | Are they believing?

00:04:01.800 | Are they escaping the wrath of God?

00:04:03.600 | Are they getting full of the Holy Spirit?

00:04:05.640 | Are they participating in biblical churches?

00:04:08.340 | It's not about our particular church getting bigger and bigger.

00:04:13.400 | And when the people understand church growth in those categories, then I think a pastor

00:04:18.560 | can say, which I did, "Not growing is not an option for us."

00:04:24.520 | And they knew what I meant when I said that.

00:04:27.840 | At least if you live in a metropolitan area with several hundred thousand unbelievers,

00:04:32.680 | that's true.

00:04:33.680 | You might live in a small town where everybody's lined up somewhere, and growth is not a very

00:04:38.720 | big possibility.

00:04:40.000 | But if you live in the Twin Cities or in any place where you have a few thousand unbelievers,

00:04:45.240 | you can talk like that.

00:04:47.820 | This can be, however, and here's a great obstacle, this can be very unsettling for

00:04:53.720 | a church.

00:04:54.720 | There are a lot of people, shame on them, for whom they're just happy with these 50

00:05:00.320 | people.

00:05:01.320 | And they're happy with these 150.

00:05:02.320 | And they're happy with these 350.

00:05:03.560 | Or they're happy with these 500.

00:05:05.080 | And frankly, they don't like all these strange faces around here.

00:05:07.860 | It's just not as comfortable as it used to be here when we all knew each other.

00:05:12.700 | That is an anti-gospel attitude, and it is deadly in the church.

00:05:17.600 | And a pastor must so preach and teach as to overcome it.

00:05:23.620 | He needs to ask, "Do we believe people are perishing forever without the gospel?

00:05:28.400 | And do we love them?"

00:05:29.560 | Those two questions.

00:05:30.560 | The first one is theological, and the second one is moral and spiritual.

00:05:34.980 | Are we thinking right about heaven and hell and faith and gospel?

00:05:39.920 | And are we feeling compassion like Paul, who agonized over his lost kinsmen in Romans 9,

00:05:46.660 | 2 and 10, 1?

00:05:49.060 | So once that foundation of right thinking about the gospel and right loving was laid,

00:05:56.180 | I went after dozens of growth strategies over the years.

00:06:00.260 | I mean, so many, I can't even begin to remember them.

00:06:04.460 | Remember them all.

00:06:06.240 | But I want to, before I list some of them, let me just say that I tried to stress that

00:06:11.260 | the normal, never-changing, bread-and-butter, steady-state, New Testament pattern of outreach

00:06:17.860 | and evangelism is not programmatic.

00:06:21.780 | It's not event-oriented.

00:06:23.360 | It's not primarily through the Sunday morning services.

00:06:26.220 | It is through the ordinary permeation of the city, through believers in their neighborhoods,

00:06:35.140 | at work, at school, in families, opening their mouths and testifying to the value of Jesus.

00:06:41.660 | That's normal, steady-state, New Testament strategies for growth.

00:06:46.780 | And I think that that mindset about the everyday life of gospel spreading is the main mindset

00:06:55.020 | and needs to be cultivated because if you create the mindset that the people are going

00:07:00.420 | to move from just one pragmatic, programmatic basket to another, here comes one event, here

00:07:08.580 | comes another event, here comes another strategy, they get jaundiced to these things.

00:07:14.180 | Instead, we need to thrill the people, interpreting week after week with the glories of being a

00:07:21.220 | Christian so that it oozes through their lives.

00:07:26.820 | But having said that that's the steady-state, bread-and-butter, normative, always-never-changing

00:07:33.980 | strategy of growth, I just want to say, yes.

00:07:38.900 | I came to this church and I created immediately a gospel pamphlet that described the gospel.

00:07:47.140 | It described something about our church.

00:07:48.740 | It had a map on the back.

00:07:50.220 | I made hundreds of them.

00:07:51.940 | I put them in the hands of the people.

00:07:53.220 | I said, "Use these to share the gospel with people and invite them to church if you want

00:07:59.220 | to."

00:08:00.220 | We put ads in the newspapers.

00:08:01.580 | This is pre-internet stuff.

00:08:04.660 | And we always had special efforts to invite people on Easter and Christmas.

00:08:10.780 | I always worked hard to create enough parking because I knew if people can't find a place

00:08:15.540 | to tie up their horse, they're not going to come in.

00:08:19.700 | We tried to make it friendly at the front end by creating guests, I mean, greeters who

00:08:26.820 | would greet guests and strategies to make them feel warm.

00:08:31.540 | We went to two services and then three services and then a Saturday night service because

00:08:35.940 | we believed that making room was a way of growth.

00:08:42.700 | In the early days for say 10, 15 years, all the way along really, I encouraged people

00:08:47.740 | to move into the poorer neighborhoods of the city where there's less gospel witness so

00:08:53.660 | that hundreds of people over the 30 years or so moved into the Phillips neighborhood

00:08:58.700 | and the North side and other parts of this area around the church.

00:09:04.700 | The Metrodome was three blocks away.

00:09:06.860 | We created pamphlets that were about baseball and Christianity, football and Christianity.

00:09:12.100 | We walked over there.

00:09:13.100 | I remember walking over there and handing out these brochures as people walked into

00:09:18.500 | the Twins games when they were playing at the Metrodome and to the Vikings games.

00:09:23.220 | We had personal evangelism training.

00:09:25.520 | We sent out evangelistic teams to the malls on Tuesday night.

00:09:28.780 | We invited campus outreach to come here because we so admired the strategy of a church-based

00:09:34.900 | campus ministry that sought to win people to Christ and then graft them into the local

00:09:42.500 | church.

00:09:43.500 | We did praise marches on big flat beds and pulled them through and had a thousand people

00:09:49.260 | marching through Phillips neighborhood singing, "Make way, make way."

00:09:53.220 | That was a song that was popular back in the 80s.

00:09:56.660 | We did Wednesday night picnics in the park and public venues and we fed people and preached

00:10:03.380 | the gospel to them.

00:10:05.540 | My answer, Tony, is yes, yes, yes.

00:10:10.000 | There should be a never-ending stream of creativity in trying to help our people reach the lost.

00:10:17.380 | But I'll end with just saying theological faithfulness and depth is essential.

00:10:24.400 | Never diluting the gospel is essential.

00:10:27.140 | Never eviscerating or dumbing down or making silly the corporate worship is essential.

00:10:33.660 | And I want to stress that I don't think pastors should preach to unbelievers.

00:10:38.540 | They should preach to the people of God Sunday after Sunday and always acknowledge the unbelievers,

00:10:45.460 | tell them you're glad they're there, tell them you're preaching to the people of God

00:10:49.140 | and rejoice that they can listen in on how great it is to be a Christian.

00:10:54.420 | That's normal ways of doing Sunday morning.

00:10:57.860 | So you don't have to structure the service for unbelievers.

00:11:01.380 | They don't expect, when an unbeliever comes to church, they expect it to be weird.

00:11:08.860 | And it should be weird.

00:11:10.100 | I mean, if it's not weird, you know what I mean.

00:11:13.580 | I mean, Paul doesn't want us to sound insane, so he doesn't like the idea of speaking in

00:11:17.780 | tongues in public.

00:11:19.500 | But unbelievers expect things to be different as Christians go hard after God in worship

00:11:27.260 | to the living Christ.

00:11:29.280 | So I think we should design our worship services for the people of God, not for unbelievers,

00:11:34.580 | and I think we should encourage people to bring unbelieving friends in spite of all

00:11:39.260 | those other things we're doing.

00:11:40.620 | This also, and the aim is to let them taste and see what it is for the people of God to

00:11:48.420 | meet God, to love God, to enjoy God, to revel in God, admire God, be satisfied in God.

00:11:54.980 | That's what unbelievers need to see.

00:11:57.860 | Incredible.

00:11:59.100 | That's helpful on all fronts, Pastor John, that emphasis on faithfulness to the message

00:12:03.100 | and trust in God's power and leading and flat-out pursuit of innovation.

00:12:07.660 | It's not only evident in your ministry, but it's evident now in how Desiring God is led

00:12:13.100 | and envisioned by you.

00:12:14.900 | So I'm very grateful for this perspective.

00:12:17.740 | For more details about this podcast or to catch up on past episodes we have released

00:12:21.020 | or to subscribe to the audio feed, even send us a question of your own, go to our online

00:12:24.600 | home at DesiringGod.org/AskPastorJohn.

00:12:29.700 | Well we recently talked about why it's wise to have little ears in big church and encouragement

00:12:34.420 | for children to be part of the corporate gathering on Sundays.

00:12:37.540 | So what about when the sermon content is not suitable for children?

00:12:40.540 | Should they stay in or should they go?

00:12:42.620 | We'll close out the week with that follow-up question on Friday.

00:12:45.380 | I'm your host, Tony Reinke.

00:12:46.980 | We'll see you then.

00:12:47.500 | [END]

00:12:49.500 | Pastor John's Version of the Sermon on the Day of Asking God for Help in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

As a Pastor, Did You Use Church Growth Strategies?

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