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Myths About Growing Churches
Get the facts at any price, and hold on tightly to all the good sense you can get.
Proverbs 23:23 (LB)
Children growing up in America learn many myths: Santa Claus brings presents via reindeer; the tooth fairy exchanges money for teeth; the Easter Bunny hides candy and eggs; when the groundhog sees his shadow, we’re in for more bad weather; the moon is made of Swiss cheese. Some of these myths are harmless, but others can cause great harm.
I have always loved the passages in the gospels where Jesus challenged the popular myths, or “conventional wisdom,” of his day. The New Testament records twenty times where Jesus used the phrase “You have heard it said… . but I say to you… .” I once preached a series of messages based on
these instances called “Myths That Make Us Miserable.” Only when we base our lives on the bedrock of God’s Word will we know “the truth that sets us free.”
Many myths about large, growing churches are circulated among pastors and church leaders. While many people have heard about the so-called megachurches (a designation I dislike), few outside these churches know what is actually happening inside them. Inaccurate assumptions are made, sometimes out of envy, sometimes out of fear, and sometimes due to ignorance.
If you are serious about seeing your own church grow, you must be willing to challenge much of the conventional wisdom about large and growing churches that you hear today.
Myth #1: The Only Thing That Large Churches Care About Is Attendance
The truth is, you won’t grow large if that is all you care about. In the entire history of Saddleback’s growth we’ve only set two attendance goals—and both were in our first year. We do not focus on attendance; we focus on assimilating all the people God brings to us.
Attendance campaigns and advertising may bring people to your church once*.* But they will not come back unless your church delivers the goods. To maintain consistent growth, you must offer people something they cannot get anywhere else.
If you are preaching the positive, life-changing Good News of Christ, if your members are excited by what God is doing in your church, if you are providing a service where they can bring unsaved friends without embarrassment, and if you have a plan to build, train, and send out those you win to Christ, attendance will be the least of your problems. People flock to that kind of church. It’s happening all around the world.
Healthy, lasting church growth is multidimensional. My definition of genuine church growth has five facets. Every church needs to grow warmer through fellowship, deeper through discipleship, stronger through worship, broader through ministry, and larger through evangelism.
In Acts 2:42–47, these five facets of growth are described in the first church at Jerusalem. The first Christians fellowshiped, edified each other, worshiped, ministered, and evangelized. As a result, verse 47 says, “And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” Note a couple of things about this verse. First, God added the growth (his part) when the church did its part (fulfill the five purposes). Second, the growth was daily, which means, at a minimum, this healthy church had 365 conversions a year! What if this was the evangelistic standard every church had to meet in order to call itself a healthy “New Testament” church? How many churches do you think would qualify?
Church growth is the natural result of church health. Church health can only occur when our message is biblical and our mission is balanced. Each of the five New Testament purposes
of the church must be in equilibrium with the others for health to occur. Balance in a church does not occur naturally; in fact, we must continually correct imbalance. It is human nature to overemphasize the aspect of the church we feel most passionate about. Intentionally setting up a strategy and a structure to force ourselves to give equal attention to each purpose is what being a purpose-driven church is all about.
Myth #2: All Large Churches Growat the Expense of Smaller Churches
Some large churches have grown at the expense of smaller churches, but that certainly is not true in Saddleback’s case. The Saddleback statistic I’mmost pleased about is the fact that 80 percent of our members found Christ and were baptized at Saddleback. We have not grown at the expense of other churches. At this writing we have about 5,000 adult members, 4,000 of whom were converted and baptized at Saddleback. Our growth has been by conversion, not by transferring Christians fromother churches.
Transferring Christians from one church to another is not what Jesus had in mind when he gave us the Great Commission. God called us to be fishers of men, not to swap fish between aquariums. A church that grows larger only by transfers from other churches is not experiencing genuine growth—it is only reshuffling the card deck.
Myth #3: You Must Choose Between Quality andQuantity in Your Church
This is, unfortunately, a widely promoted myth that simply isn’t true. Part of the problem is that no one ever defines what they mean by the terms quality and quantity. Let me give you my definitions.
Quality refers to the kind of disciples a church is producing. Are people being genuinely transformed into the likeness of Christ? Are believers grounded in the Word? Are they maturing in Christ? Are they using their talents in service and ministry? Are they sharing their faith regularly with others? These are just a few ways to measure the quality of a church.
Quantity refers to the number of disciples a church is producing. How many people are being brought to Christ, developed to maturity, and mobilized for ministry and missions?
Once the terms are defined, it’s obvious that quality and quantity are not in opposition of each other. They are not mutually exclusive. You do not have to choose between the two. Every church should want both. In fact, an exclusive focus on either quality or quantity will produce an unhealthy church. Don’t be fooled by either/or thinking.
When you go fishing, do you want quality or quantity? I want both! I want to catch the biggest fish I can, and I want to catch as many as I can. Every church should desire to reach as many people for Christ as possible as well as desire to help those people become as spiritually mature as possible.
The fact that many pastors wish to ignore is this: Quality produces quantity. A church full of genuinely changed people attracts others. If you study healthy churches you’ll discover that when God finds a church that is doing a quality job of winning, nurturing, equipping, and sending out believers, he sends that church plenty of raw material. On the other hand, why would God send a lot of prospects to a church that doesn’t know what to do with them?
In any church where lives are being changed, marriages are being saved, and love is flowing freely, you’ll have to lock the doors to keep people from attending. People are attracted to churches with quality worship, preaching, ministry, and fellowship. Quality attracts quantity. Every pastor needs to ask a very tough question: If most of our members never invite anyone to come to our church, what are they saying (by their actions) about the quality of what our church offers?
It is also true that quantity creates quality in some areas of church life. For instance, the bigger your church gets, the better your music gets. Would you rather sing with eleven people or eleven hundred people? Would you rather be a part of a single-adult program with two people or two hundred people?
Some churches excuse their lack of growth by insisting that the smaller a church is, the more quality it can maintain. This reasoning is faulty. If quality is inherent in smallness, then, logically, the highest quality churches would consist of only one person! On the contrary, having spent much of my life
prior to Saddleback in small churches, I have observed that one reason many churches remain small is because there is little quality in the life and ministry of those churches. There is no correlation between the size and the quality of a ministry.
What if your parents had applied the quality versus quantity myth to having children? What if, after their first child, they had said, “One kid is enough. Let’s focus on making this child a quality kid. Let’s not worry about quantity.” Most of us wouldn’t be here if our parents had thought that!
A church that has no interest at all in increasing its number of converts is, in essence, saying to the rest of the world, “You all can go to hell.” If my three kids were lost on a wilderness trip, my wife and I would be consumed with finding them. We’d spare no expense to seek and save our lost children.And when we found one child, we wouldn’t think of calling off the search and just focusing on the one “quality” kid we had left. We’d keep looking as long as any child was still lost.
In the church’s case, as long as there are lost people in the world we must care about quantity as well as quality. At Saddleback, we count people because people count. Those numbers represent people Jesus died for. Anytime someone says, “You can’t measure success by numbers,” my response is, “It all depends on what you’re counting!” If you’re counting marriages saved, lives transformed, broken people healed, unbelievers becoming worshipers of Jesus, and members being mobilized for ministry and missions, numbers
are extremely important. They have eternalsignificance.
Myth #4: You Must Compromise the Message andthe Mission of the Church in Order to Grow
This popular myth implies that the leaders of growing churches are somehow “selling out” the Gospel in order to grow. The assumption is that if a church is attracting people, it must be shallow and lacking in commitment. It assumes that the presence of a large crowd indicates a “watered-down” message.
Of course, there are examples of churches that have grown large with faulty theology, shallow commitment, and worldly gimmicks. But the presence of a large crowd doesn’t automatically indicate that this is the case. While a few large churches have compromised their message and mission, many others, like Saddleback, are unfairly placed in the same category due to our size. This guilt by association is unfortunate.
Jesus’ ministry attracted enormous crowds. Why? Because the Gospel is good news! It has an attractive power when clearly presented. Jesus said, “When I am lifted up from the earth, [I] will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32). Not only did crowds of adults want to be around Jesus, so did young children. A Christlike church will have the same drawing effect on people.
Jesus drew large crowds yet he never compromised the
truth. No one accused him of watering down the message except the jealous chief priests, who criticized him out of envy (Mark 15:12). Frankly, I suspect that same ministerial jealousy motivates some today who criticize churches that attract large crowds.
Don’t confuse expectations
Another reason many people think large churches are shallow is because they confuse what is expected of unbelieving attenders with what is expected of the actual church members. These are two very different groups. At Saddleback we use the terms “the Crowd” and “the Congregation” to distinguish between the groups.
At Saddleback Church we do not expect unbelievers to act like believers until they are. We do not expect visitors in the crowd to act like members of the congregation*.* We expect very little from the seeker who is investigating the claims of Christ. We simply say, as Jesus did in his first encounter with the disciples, “Come and see!” We invite unbelievers to check us out, to see for themselves what the church is all about.
On the other hand, we require a major commitment from those who want to join our church. I’ll share these details in chapter 17. All prospective members must complete a membership class and are required to sign a membership covenant. By signing the covenant, members agree to give financially, serve in a ministry, share their faith, follow the leadership, avoid gossip, and maintain a godly lifestyle, among
other things. Saddleback practices church discipline something rarely heard of today. If you do not fulfill the membership covenant, you are dropped from our membership. We remove hundreds of names fromour roll every year.
New members also agree to take additional classes where they will sign growth covenants that include tithing, having a daily quiet time, and participating weekly in a small group. One of the reasons Saddleback has not had a lot of transfer growth is because we expect so much more from our members than most other churches do.
I’ve discovered that challenging people to a serious commitment actually attracts people rather than repels them. The greater the commitment we ask for, the greater the response we get. Many unbelievers are fed up and bored with what the world offers. They are looking for something greater than themselves, something worth giving their lives to.
Asking for commitment doesn’t turn people off; it is the way many churches ask for it. Too often, churches fail to explain the purpose, value, and benefits of commitment, and they have no process to help people take gradualsteps in their commitment.
Being contemporary without compromising
Anyone who is serious about doing ministry, not just theorizing about it, must be willing to live with the tension of what Bruce and Marshall Shelley call “our ambidextrous calling.” On the one hand we are obligated to remain faithful to
the unchanging Word of God. On the other hand we must minister in an ever-changing world. Sadly, many Christians unwilling to live with this tension retreat to one of two extremes.
Some churches, fearing worldly infection, retreat into isolation from today’s culture. While most do not retreat as far back as the Amish have, many churches seem to think that the 1950s was the golden age, and they are determined to preserve that era in their church. What I admire about the Amish is at least they are honest about it. They freely admit that they have chosen to preserve the lifestyle of the 1800s. In contrast, churches that try to perpetuate the culture of the 1950s usually deny their intent or they try to prove with proof-texts that they are doing it the way it was done in New Testament times.
Then there are those who, fearing irrelevance, foolishly imitate the latest fad and fashion. In their attempt to relate to today’s culture they compromise the message and lose all sense of being set apart. Too often, these churches offer a message that emphasizes the benefits of the Gospel while ignoring the responsibility and cost of following Christ.
Is there a way to minister in our culture without compromising our convictions? I believe there is and I will discuss this more fully in chapter 12. The solution is to follow Christ’s example of ministering to people. Jesus never lowered his standards, but he always started where people were. He was contemporary without compromising the truth.
Myth #5: If You Are DedicatedEnough, Your Church Will Grow
This is a favorite myth promoted at pastors’ conferences, where speakers piously imply that if your church is not growing, the problem is your lack of dedication. They say, “If you’ll just stay doctrinally pure, preach the Word, pray more, and be dedicated, then your church will explode with growth.” It sounds so simple and so spiritual, but it just isn’t true. Instead of being encouraged by these conferences, many pastors leave feeling more guilty, more inadequate, and more frustrated.
I know hundreds of dedicated pastors whose churches are not growing. They are faithful to God’s Word, they pray earnestly and consistently, they preach solid messages, and their dedication is unquestioned—but still their churches refuse to grow. It is an insult to say that their problem is a lack of dedication. Few things infuriate me faster. These are good, godly pastors who serve God wholeheartedly.
It takes more than dedication to lead a church to grow; it takes skill. One of my favorite verses is Ecclesiastes 10:10: “If the ax is dull and its edge unsharpened, more strength is needed but skill will bring success.” Notice that God says skill, not just dedication, will bring success. If I have wood to chop, I’ll do a better job by sharpening my ax first. The point is, work smarter, not harder.
Take the time to learn the skills you need in ministry. You’ll
save time in the long run and be far more successful. Sharpen your ministry ax by reading books, attending conferences, listening to tapes, and by observing working models. You’re never wasting time when you’re sharpening your ax. Skill brings success.
In our church there are a number of professional pilots who fly for the major airlines. They tell me that no matter how long they’ve been pilots, the airlines require that twice a year they spend a week retraining and sharpening their skills. When I asked themwhy retraining is required so often, the answer was, “Because people’s lives depend on how skilled we are.” That’s true of ministry as well. Should we be any less concerned about keeping our skills up-to-date?
At Saddleback, we offer a basic training conference for church leaders and pastors at least once a year. Even though our staff is thoroughly acquainted with Saddleback’s vision, strategy, and structure, I require each of them to attend the conference. We all need to have our vision reenergized and our skills sharpened on a regular basis.
The reason the apostle Paul was so effective in planting and developing churches was because he was skilled at it. He admits this in 1 Corinthians 3:10: “By the grace God has given me, I laid a foundation as an expert builder” (italics added). Paul was an expert at building churches. He was not a haphazard builder who did shoddy work. Not only was he dedicated to his task, he was skilled at using the right tools. We too must learn to use the right tools in building a church. If
all you have is a hammer in your ministry toolbox, you’ll tend to treat everything as a nail!
The Bible also compares ministry to farming, another profession that requires skill. A farmer can be a dedicated and hard worker but he must also be skilled in using the right equipment. If he tries to harvest a corn field with a wheat harvester, he’s bound to fail. If he tries to harvest tomatoes with a cotton picker, he’ll end up with a mess! Successful ministry, like farming, requires more than dedication and hard work; it takes skill, timing, and the right tools.
Many simplistic solutions for church growth are couched in such pious terms that it makes it difficult for anyone to challenge them without seeming unspiritual. Somebody needs to boldly state the obvious: Prayer alone will not grow a church. Some of the greatest prayer warriors I know are pastors and members of dying churches.
Of course, prayer is absolutely essential. Every step of Saddleback’s development has been bathed in prayer. In fact, I have a prayer team that prays for me while I speak at each of our four weekend services. A prayerless ministry is a powerless ministry. But it takes far more than prayer to grow a church. It takes skilled action. One time God told Joshua to stop praying about his failure and get up and correct the cause of it instead (Josh. 7). There is a time to pray, and there is a time to act responsibly.
We must always be careful to avoid two extreme positions in
ministry. One extreme is to assume all responsibility for the growth of the church. The other extreme is to abdicate all responsibility for it. I am deeply indebted to Joe Ellis for identifying these two extremes and helping me sort out the issues of responsibility and faithfulness in ministry. Joe identifies the first error as “practical humanism” and the second as “pious irresponsibility.” Both are fatal to a church.
First, we must avoid the error that all it takes to grow a church is organization, management, and marketing. The church is not a business! I’ve talked to some pastors who act as if the church is merely a human enterprise with a few prayers thrown in for good measure. After listening to them, I’ve wondered, Where is the Holy Spirit in all of this?
Unfortunately, many churches can be explained away in terms of a standard Sunday school, an efficient organization, and a balanced budget. Nothing supernatural ever happens in these churches, and few lives are genuinely changed.
All of our plans, programs, and procedures are worthless without God’s anointing. Psalm 127:1 says, “Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.” A church cannot be built by human effort alone. We must never forget whose church it is. Jesus said, “I will build my church” (Matt. 16:18, italics added).
On the other hand, we must avoid the error that there is nothing we can do to help a church grow. This misconception is just as prevalent today. Some pastors and theologians
believe that any planning, organizing, advertising, or effort is presumptuous, unspiritual, or even sinful, and that our only role is to sit back and watch God do his thing. You will find a lot of this teaching in literature on revival. In a sincere desire to emphasize God’s work in revival, all human effort is disparaged. This way of thinking produces passive believers and often uses spiritual-sounding excuses to justify a church’s failure to grow.
The Bible clearly teaches that God has given us a critical role to play in accomplishing his will on earth. Church growth is a partnership between God and man. Churches grow by the power of God through the skilled effort of people. Both elements, God’s power and man’s skilled effort, must be present. We cannot do it without God but he has decided not to do it without us! God uses people to accomplish his purposes.
Paul illustrated this partnership between God and man when he said, “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow … we are God’s fellow workers …” (1 Cor. 3:6, 9 LB, italics added). God did his part after Paul and Apollos did their part.
The New Testament is full of analogies of church growth that teach this principle: planting and cultivating God’s garden (1 Cor. 3:5–9); building God’s building (1 Cor. 3:10–13); harvesting God’s fields (Matt. 9:37–38); growing Christ’s body (Rom. 12:4–8; Eph. 4:16).
For an Old Testament example, we can look to the book of Joshua. God told the Israelites to take possession of the land; he did not do it for them. He offered them a partnership and gave them a role to play. But because of their fear and passivity, the Israelites died in the wilderness. While we wait for God to work for us, God is waiting to work through us.
Myth #6: There Is One Secret Key to Church Growth
Church growth is a complex matter. It is seldom caused by just one factor. Anytime you hear a pastor attribute the growth of his church to one single factor, realize that he is either oversimplifying what has occurred, or he may not be recognizing the real reason his church is growing.
Through my interactions with church leaders who’ve taken the Saddleback training, I’ve identified a few basic facts about churches that my staff call “Rick’s Rules of Growth.”
First, there is more than one way to grow a church. I could show you churches that are using strategies exactly opposite of each other, yet both are growing. Some churches grow through their Sunday schools; others use small groups in homes. Some churches grow by using contemporary music; others grow using traditional music. Some growing churches have an organized visitation program; others have never had one.
Second, it takes all kinds of churches to reach all kinds of people. Thank God we’re not all alike! God loves variety. If
every church was like all the others we’d only reach one small segment of this world. In just the area of music alone, imagine all the styles of music needed to reach all the different cultures of our world. Every once in a while I hear someone say that all churches should get together under one denomination where we would all be the same. I couldn’t disagree more. I think diversity in style is a strength, not a weakness. God uses different approaches to reach different groups of people.
I’m not talking about churches deviating from biblical truth. The message of Christ must never change. It is, as Jude said, “… the truth which God gave, once for all, to his people to keep without change through the years” (Jude 1:3 LB, italics added). Don’t confuse methods with the message. The message must never change, but the methods must change with each new generation.
Third, never criticize what God is blessing, even though it may be a style of ministry that makes you feel uncomfortable. It is amazing to me how God often blesses people I disagree with or don’t understand. So I’ve adopted this attitude: If lives are being changed by the power of Jesus Christ—then I like the way you are doing it! We are all trophies of God’s grace.
Myth #7: All GodExpects of Us Is Faithfulness
This statement is only half true. God expects both faithfulness and fruitfulness. Fruitfulness is a major theme of the New Testament. Consider the following:
- We are called by Christ to bear fruit. “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit—fruit that will last” (John 15:16). God wants to see lasting fruit come fromour ministry.
- Being fruitful is the way we glorify God. “This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples” (John 15:8). An unfruitful ministry does not bring glory to God, but a fruitful ministry is the proof that we are Christ’s disciples.
- Being fruitful pleases God. “We pray this in order that you may live a life worthy of the Lord and may please him in every way: bearing fruit in every good work” (Col. 1:10). Jesus reserved his severest judgment for the unfruitful
- tree. He cursed it because it didn’t bear fruit. “Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, ‘May you never bear fruit again!’ Immediately the tree withered” (Matt.
- point: He expects fruitfulness! The nation of Israel lost its privilege because of
21:19). Jesus did not do this to show off but to make a
unfruitfulness. “Therefore I tell you that the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people who will produce its fruit” (Matt. 21:43). This same principle can be applied to individual churches. I have seen God remove his hand of blessing from churches churches that had been greatly blessed in the past because they became self-satisfied and self-absorbed
and stopped bearing fruit.
What is fruitfulness? The word fruit, or a variation of it, is used fifty-five times in the New Testament and refers to a variety of results. Each one of the following is considered by God to be fruit: repentance (Matt. 3:8; Luke 13:5–9), practicing the truth (Matt. 7:16–21; Col. 1:10), answered prayer (John 15:7–8), an offering of money given by believers (Rom. 15:28), Christlike character, and winning unbelievers to Christ (Rom. 1:13). Paul said he wanted to preach in Rome “in order that I might obtain some fruit among you also, even as among the rest of the Gentiles” (Rom. 1:13 NASB). The fruit of a believer is another believer.
Considering the Great Commission that Jesus gave to the church, I believe that the definition of fruitfulness for a local church must include growth by the conversion of unbelievers. Paul referred to the first converts in Achaia as the “first fruit of Achaia” (1 Cor. 16:15 NASB).
The Bible clearly identifies numerical growth of the church as fruit. Many of the kingdom parables of Jesus emphasize the unavoidable truth that God expects his church to grow. In addition, Paul connected fruit bearing with church growth. Colossians 1:6 says, “All over the world this gospel is bearing fruit and growing, just as it has been doing among you since the day you heard it …” (italics added). Is your church bearing fruit and growing? Are you seeing the fruit of new converts being added to your congregation?
God wants your church to be both faithful and fruitful. One without the other is only half the equation. Numerical results are no justification for being unfaithful to the message, but neither can we use faithfulness as an excuse for being ineffective! Churches that have few or no conversions often attempt to justify their ineffectiveness with the statement, “God has not called us to be successful. He has just called us to be faithful.” I strongly disagree because the Bible clearly teaches that God expects both.
The sticking point is how you define the terms successful and faithful. I define being successful as fulfilling the Great Commission. Jesus has given the church a job to do. We will either succeed or fail at it. Using this definition, every church should want to be successful! What is the alternative? The opposite of success is not faithfulness, but failure. Any church that is not obeying the Great Commission is failing its purpose, no matter what else it does.
What is faithfulness? Usually we define it in terms of beliefs. We think that by holding orthodox beliefs we are fulfilling Christ’s command to be faithful. We call ourselves “defenders of the faith.” But Jesus meant far more than adherence to beliefs when he used the term. He defined faithfulness in terms of behavior—a willingness to take risks (that require faith) in order to be fruitful.
The clearest example of this is the parable of the talents in Matthew 25:14–30. The two men who doubled the talents the master gave them were called “good and faithful servants.” In
other words, they proved their faithfulness by taking risks that produced fruit. They were successful at the task that they had been assigned, and they were rewarded for it by the master.
The passive, fearful servant who did nothing with the talent he was given produced no results for the master because he would not take a risk. He was called “wicked and lazy” in contrast to the two men called “faithful” for producing results. The point of the story is clear: God expects to see results. Our faithfulness is demonstrated by our fruit.
Faithfulness is accomplishing as much as possible with the resources and talents God has given you. That’s why comparing churches is an illegitimate way to measure success. Success is not being larger than some other church; it is bearing as much fruit as possible given your gifts, opportunities, and potential.
Christ doesn’t expect us to produce more than we can, but he does expect us to produce all that we can by his power within us. That is a lot more than most of us think is possible. We expect too little from God, and we attempt too little for him. If you’re not taking any risks in your ministry, then it is not requiring that you have faith. And if your ministry doesn’t require any faith, then you are being unfaithful.
How do you define faithfulness? Are you being faithful to God’s Word if you insist on communicating it in an outdated style? Are you being faithful if you insist on doing ministry in a way that is comfortable for you, even though it doesn’t
produce any fruit? Are you being faithful to Christ if you value man-made traditions more than reaching people for him? I contend that when a church continues to use methods that no longer work, it is being unfaithful to Christ!
Sadly, there are many churches today who are completely orthodox in their beliefs but are still unfaithful to Christ because they refuse to change programs, methods, styles of worship, buildings, or even locations in order to reach a lost world for Christ. Vance Havner used to say, “A church can be straight as a gun barrel doctrinally and just as empty spiritually.” We must be willing to say, with unreserved commitment to our Lord and Savior, “We’ll do whatever it takes to reach people for Christ.”
Myth #8: You Can’t Learn from Large Churches
Saddleback’s story of growth is a sovereign act of God that cannot be replicated. However, we should extract the lessons and principles that are transferable. To ignore what God has taught our church would be unwise stewardship. “Remember today what you have learned about the Lord through your experiences with him” (Deut. 11:2 TEV). Every church should not have to reinvent the wheel.
Anytime I see a program working in another church, I try to extract the principle behind it and apply it in our church. Because of this, our church has benefited from many other models that we’ve studied, both contemporary and historical. I’m very grateful for the models that have helped me. I learned
a long time ago that I don’t have to originate everything for it to work. God has not called us to be original at everything. He has called us to be effective.
To reduce the risk of copying the wrong things, however, I want to identify what is transferable fromSaddleback’s example and what isn’t.
What you can’t copy
First, you won’t be able to transfer our context. Every church operates in a unique cultural setting. Saddleback is located in the middle of a busy, southern California suburban area, filled with well-educated young couples. It isn’t Peoria, Illinois; Muleshoe, Texas; or even Los Angeles, California. Every community is unique. To artificially plant a Saddleback clone in a different environment is a formula for failure. Despite my clear warning, some have tried this anyway and then wondered why things didn’t work out.
Second, you won’t be able to replicate our staf . God uses people to do his work. The leadership of any programis always more crucial than the program itself. I’ve spent fifteen years building a staff team that together is more effective that any one of us would be on our own. Individually, we’re all pretty ordinary folk. But when you put us together, somehow our mixture of gifts, personalities, and backgrounds creates a powerful synergy that baffles management experts and has allowed us to accomplish some amazing tasks.
Third, you can’t be me. (No one in his right mind would want my weaknesses.) Only I can be me, and only you can be you. That’s the way God intended it. When you get to heaven, God is not going to say, “Why weren’t you more like Rick Warren (or Jerry Falwell or Bill Hybels or John MacArthur or anyone else)?” God is likely to say, “Why weren’t you more like you?”
God made you to be yourself. He wants to use your gifts, your passion, your natural abilities, your personality, and your experiences to impact your part of the world. All of us start out as originals. Unfortunately, many end up as carbon copies of someone else. You cannot grow a church trying to be someone else.
What you can learn
First, you can learn principles. As the old cliché says, “Methods are many, principles are few; methods change often, principles never do.” If a principle is biblical, I believe it is transcultural. It will work anywhere. It’s wise to learn and apply principles fromwatching how God is working around the world. While you cannot grow a church trying to be someone else, y o u can grow a church by using principles someone else discovered and then filtering them through your personality and context.
I’ve never been interested in producing clones of Saddleback. That’s one reason I chose a local name for our church rather than a generic name that could be copied. Unless you live in our community, the name “Saddleback” won’t work
for you. Not one of the twenty-five daughter churches we’ve started is doing ministry exactly like Saddleback. I encourage them to filter what they’ve learned from us through their context and personality.
God has a custom ministry for every church. Your church has a unique thumbprint that God has given it. But you can learn from models without becoming a clone! We learn best and fastest by observing models. After all, most of what we learn in life is learned by watching someone model it. Never be embarassed to use a model; it is a sign of intelligence! Proverbs 18:15 (LB) says, “The intelligent man is always open to new ideas. In fact, he looks for them.”
Paul was certainly not afraid of using models for the churches he started. He told the church at Thessalonica, “You became imitators of us and of the Lord… . And so you became a model to all the believers in Macedonia and Achaia” (1 Thess. 1:6–7). This is my prayer for your church. I hope you’ll be able to learn from Saddleback’s model, and that you will, in turn, become a model for other churches.
Saddleback is by no means a perfect church, but it is a healthy church (as my children will never be perfect, but they are healthy). A church doesn’t have to be perfect to be a model. If perfection were a requirement for being a model, you can forget trying to learn anything fromany church. There are no perfect churches.
Let me warn you: If you implement the strategy and ideas in
this book in your church, someone is bound to say, “You got that from Saddleback.” You should respond, “So what! They got what they know from hundreds of other churches.” Remember, we’re all on the same team.
I believe that people who can’t learn from models have an ego problem. The Bible says, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (James 4:6). Why does God do this? One reason is that when people are full of pride they are unteachable: They think they know it all. I’ve found that when people think they have all the answers, it usually means they don’t even know all the questions. My goal is to learn as much as I can, fromas many people as I can, as often as I can. I try to learn from critics, from people I disagree with, and even from enemies.
Second, you can learn a process. This book is about a process, not programs. It offers a system for developing the people in your church and balancing the purposes of your church. Having watched Saddleback’s strategy of assimilating people who work under the heavy demands of a rapidly growing church, I’m confident the purpose-driven process can work in other churches where the pace of growth is more reasonable. We’ve now seen it produce strong, fruitful believers in thousands of small and medium-sized churches. It is not a strategy for just the megachurch.
People forget that Saddleback was once a very small church. It grew large by using the purpose-driven process. I’ve had many church leaders say to me after I’ve explained the process
to them, “Why, anybody can do this!” I reply, “That’s the point!” Healthy churches are built on a process, not on personalities.
Finally, you can learn some methods. No method is meant to last forever or work everywhere, but that doesn’t make it worthless. Recently, church-growth methods have gotten a bad reputation. In some circles, they are considered unspiritual, even carnal. Because some church-growth enthusiasts have overemphasized methods to the neglect of sound doctrine and the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit, others have gone just as far to the other extreme and are ready to throw out all talk of methods.
Every church uses some type of methodology, intentionally or unintentionally, so the question isn’t whether or not to use methods. The issue is what kind of methods you use, and whether or not they are biblical and effective.
Methods are just expressions of principles. There are many different ways to express biblical principles in different cultural settings. The book of Acts has many examples of how the first Christians used different methods for different situations.
If you study the churches of today, it is obvious that God uses all kinds of methods, and that he blesses some methods more than others. It is also obvious that some methods that worked in the past are no longer effective. Fortunately, one of the great strengths of Christianity has been its ability to change methods when confronted with new cultures and times.
History dramatically illustrates the church’s continuous creation of “new wineskins.” God gives the church new methods to reach each new generation. Ecclesiastes 3:6 says, “[There is] a time to keep and a time to throw away.” This verse can be applied to methodology. Each generation of the church must decide which methods to keep using and which ones should be thrown away because they are no longer effective.
You probably won’t like some of the methods we use at Saddleback. That’s okay. I don’t expect you to since I don’t even like everything we’re doing! Read this book like you’d eat fish: Pick out the meat and throw away the bones. Adopt and adapt what you can use. One of the most important skills of leadership is learning to distinguish between what is essential and what isn’t. The method must always be subservient to the message. Whenever you read a book about church health or growth, don’t confuse primary issues with secondary ones.
The primary issues of church health and growth:
- Who is our master?
- What is our message?
- What is our motive?
Secondary issues of church health and growth:
- Who is our market?
- What are our models?
What are our methods?
Albert Einstein once lamented that one of the great weaknesses of the twentieth century is that we habitually confuse the means with the end. For the church, this is especially dangerous. We must never become so enamored with methods that we lose sight of our mission and forget our message.
Unfortunately, many churches operate on the misconceptions and myths I’ve identified in this chapter. This prevents them from being healthy and growing to their full potential. Churches need tru t h to grow. Cults may grow without truth but churches can’t. First Timothy 3:15 talks about “the pillar and foundation of the truth.” In the next section of this book we’ll look at how to lay a foundation of truth on which God can build his church.