From Pastor Rod - From February 2019 Newsletter
One of the tensions we wrestle with as a small church is the question of growth. Now, fairly often, I hear comments about how nice it would be if our little church could grow.
Often times, the comment goes like this: “I want our church to grow. I just don’t want it to change.”
Change is hard, there’s no doubt. We all like things to be comfortably the same, even when we say we’d like to grow. But isn’t wanting to grow, but not really change actually like saying “I want to lose weight, but I really want to eat bacon cheeseburgers all day”? Well, yes, it’s exactly like that.
Let’s remember two things. Our job as a church is not necessarily to grow. Our job is to be the body of Christ in this community at whatever size we are. That’s not to say that growth is a bad thing, it’s just not the main thing.
Secondly, growth is possible in our church. But, it will most likely require some change. Now, the problem with change is that 10 people or 100 people will never agree on everything. The truth is, your patterns, habits and level of effectiveness as a church got you to where you are now. If you want to maintain the status quo, keep doing what you’re doing right now. If you don’t want your current level of effectiveness, this will require some change. It’s really not any more complicated than that.
As a congregation, we can plot our growth. If we continue doing what we’re doing today, where will we be 1 year, 2 years and 5 years from now? If we change X, where will we be 1 year, 2 years and 5 years from now? Sure, we don’t know for sure where we’ll end up, but if we start asking the important questions, we’ll be amazed at what we can discover.
Most changes are really small, but we feel like they are large, because “we’ve always done it this way.” For instance, if we started singing one song out of a different hymnal each week, that would be a very small change. If we completely changed hymnals, that would be a slightly larger change. If we brought in a praise band every week, that would be a big change. But how many would come unglued at a small change such as just singing a couple of different hymns? To learn to deal with change, we must keep things in perspective.
Soon, we will begin discussions about our future vision and mission as a church. I hope you will all keep an open mind and consider where we are going as a church. I’m not promoting major changes, but some small, incremental changes over time may be necessary to keep our church vital and growing. If you decide as a church that you are content with the status quo, then we will not change. But that decision means that we will live with the possible consequences – stagnation, decline and decay, over time.
Let’s keep an open mind to what new possibilities might be awaiting our congregation if we work together to have a vision, and a stated mission for where we are going.
God’s blessings,