When I began my education to prepare for the ministry, I went to a Baptist college that was very much immersed in what came to be called the “church growth movement.” The term “mega-church” hadn’t been coined yet, but there were many churches in our fellowship that gathered thousands of people every week, with a few having ten thousand or more in attendance. The pastors of those churches were revered, and their explanations of “how to build a church” were eagerly heard and followed. These pastors were in high demand as conference speakers, and their churches were written about in books by “church growth experts.”
I grew up in one of those large churches, and accepted and absorbed these ideas about church growth without question. But there were lots of churches in our fellowship that were much smaller, numbering in the hundreds, and many more that has a hundred people or less in their weekly attendance. Somehow the unspoken thought was that their smaller churches and their pastors weren’t doing it right, somehow falling short or not measuring up. Because if they were doing things the right, and if the pastors were dedicated enough, committed enough, loved Jesus enough, and worked hard enough (often at the expense of their families), then, of course, the church would grow. And if a church wasn’t growing, well, that was a pretty good indicator of the disappointing lack in these churches and these pastors. The unfortunate result of all this stuff was that lots of churches and pastors felt like failures. Some pastors even attempted to commit suicide because their churches weren’t growing.
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