Aug. 8, 2024

By Rev. Rick King

“Church growth” has always made me a bit squeamish. Don’t get me wrong, worshiping at a growing, vital church is exciting: there’s lots of energy, usually many children and youth, and it’s kind of fun when you’re in a sanctuary so packed that your personal space is somewhat invaded.

But if you think of it, this is the kind of spectacle Americans tend to be enthralled by. “Bigger is better,” we say. We are drawn by curiosity and the crowds. “What draws so many people?” we ask.

The lure of being part of a growing church can be seductive, too. Many former mainline churches long for it, out of a (perhaps idealized) longing for the good old days. The longing for our churches to grow again can be rooted in a kind of nostalgia—“make the church great again,” if you will.

But I have always been somewhat suspicious of an extreme preoccupation with growth in churches. The stated goal is often “to reach the lost,” which is never how we in the UCC define people outside the church, anyway. But worse, the often-unstated goal is to keep the church afloat with people and funds. And that’s not a good enough reason to grow.

People who are searching for a church these days are coming for spiritual rather than social reasons, out of a longing for God, community, and compassion, for themselves and for the world. They can sense inauthenticity and mere spectacle a mile away.

But what if growth is coupled with a mission to reach the church’s wider community and actually be a help and support to people’s spiritual lives and material needs? When growth flows from such a mission, helping people who are searching for kindness, service, relationships and grace, it can be life-changing both for individuals and church.

A longing to reach people unreached yet by any church leads to different decisions than simply wanting to “grow the church,” and the authenticity of that longing is contagious; new people sense that this is “the real deal.”

The other difference between growth for its own sake and a genuine desire to reach new people is that Christianity thrives on people’s first-time encounters with this kind of healthy community, and a message of grace, forgiveness, affirmation and honesty. There’s a sense of discovery, a new identity, belonging and purpose among people who are encountering that message—spoken and demonstrated—for the first time.

This past week, I read a statistic that surprised me: Only 25 percent of Americans attend church weekly. Initially, I thought, “I didn’t know it was THAT low!”

But the flip side of that is, there are so many people left to reach.

Where in your circles of relationships do you see this? Where do you see opportunity for the love of God?