Good Growth

There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer.

The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not growing is a sign of it not being healthy; or used to defend either a growing church or a focus on numerical growth within your church.

To put my cards on the table: your church that isn’t growing could be healthy or unhealthy. On its own growth isn’t an indicator either way. Growing is not a bad thing, it’s often a good thing, but it isn’t always. A focus on numerical growth—by which I mean making that a goal rather than dealing with growth as it comes as a result of other things—is typically a bad thing.

Post-Covid many British churches shrunk or closed. Many other ballooned. With the recent Nigerian diaspora, many churches have ballooned again. There were other challenges in both moments of growth, but my point is simply this: ballooning isn’t desirable.

Of course, if it happens then you react to it as best you can, scrambling to teach doctrine and culture, carefully considering how and where to reconfigure structures, as well as all the other things you usually do to help new people join. You celebrate the new people, they themselves are precious gifts. But the fact of sudden growth is difficult for leaders. It’s inevitable that scrambling to keep up will be less ideal than if you’d grown to that size slowly over a number of years.

Why’s that? Because slow growth is good growth. Most of the time, good growth is slow growth.

I don’t want to suggest that all fast growth is cancerous, but I do want to suggest that it provokes a crisis of leadership. Churches are like trees and growing them is the slow work of pruning and watering and watching over multiple generations. A Church’s Pastors and other governing authorities are supposed to slowly grow with the church. You hope that some of this growth is numerical, though that can be as much a factor of place as anything else, but we can be talking about growth in depth and discipleship too.

We slowly mature as God gives us the grace to suffer. We can grow very suddenly through particularly difficult periods, and sudden growth in a church is this for leaders: a period of intense difficulty. It might be joyous difficulty but it’s stretching because naturally we mature slowly through a long series of small knocks. The danger with the sudden stretch is that a big blow to the head always runs the risk of killing you.

I’ve only seen this on a fairly small scale, though in what would be considered ‘medium to large’ churches in the UK. I can only imagine whether this applies in much bigger settings, but my sense would be that the principle does even though the specifics will be very different.

Good growth for a church is slow and steady, the whole body growing together. Sudden influxes of people are like grafting a branch onto a tree. Doable (and as a Gentile I am such a graft onto Israel’s tree: Christ), but difficult and requiring more skill than watching it weather the sun and storms while providing water and pruning.

The principle applies to us as people too. You can grow in your sanctification in a very sudden dramatic moment where in the Spirit God changes you. I’ve experienced this myself. It’s strange because all of a sudden you’re very different but you don’t really know how to operate in this new reality and you have to relearn yourself. In a moment (though long foreshadowed through the work of friends and the Word, so was it really all that sudden?) all of my passivity faded away and it still took me years to learn how to not overcompensate and who I was, nonetheless. I didn’t actually learn to walk in that gift until a few years later when our lead elder was morally compromised and suddenly you’ve got to sort that out and Pastor a church through it.

But good growth is slow growth. Are those couple of moments when God has done that to me bad? No, they were wonderful touches of grace. The problem comes if I start to think that’s normal and everyone needs a crisis moment that leads to huge character change. Ideally growth is slow. We should seek growth that’s slow. Most sanctification should happen through the slow plodding walk of hearing the Word preached, taking the Supper, worshipping the Lord, and rubbing shoulders with the people of God.

It’s the same with churches, there’s nothing inherently wrong with sudden bursts of growth. The problem is that those who manage to successfully navigate their churches through them without losing doctrine, culture, or some other vital thing—all of which are risks with sudden growth, you have that same organisational identity crisis that I did as an individual—have a tendency to want to tell us all that our churches should do the same things. But slow growth is good growth and to be encouraged.

When the Lord by his gracious hand turns everything upside down, we trust that it is for good purpose. We shouldn’t seek it otherwise.

You and I live in a world dominated by sudden changes. I’ve been trained by the black glass master I keep in my pocket (my smartphone) for things to be available instantly. Ideally with haptic feedback and a little dose of dopamine. The 24-hour news cycle has for decades now forced us into ‘present shock’ where ‘everything happens now.’ The idea that maybe something might take a lifetime—or longer—to grow well is alien to us. That’s why we’re particularly susceptible to assuming that everything should be sudden and the world should turn on its head. I see this in myself. I greatly overestimate how much can change in an instant.

We need to keep reminding ourselves, slow growth is good growth. We thank the Lord when he intervenes in a surprising way and we scramble to keep up. Mostly we thank the Lord for the slow gifts of seasons, of sun and rain, and of good soil. Your church is a tree, and so are you. Breathe. Take your time. Think a little longer term. Little will change in a year, but sit under the word preached in one place for a decade and you’ll be surprised what the Lord might build in your own heart and in the people around you.

Photo by Francesco Gallarotti on Unsplash

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