Church Death - Church Growth

(Forgive me for not regularly posting these days, those of you who you check to see if I am. And forgive me for not doing the usual work I do when I do make a post, such as today.)

For some reason, the idea of church expansion and growth came to my mind while I was working on a paper due this week. I'm sure there are healthy churches that grow, that is, acquire new members and converts. I'm sure there are some that are actually preaching the Gospel. But, I am also aware that some church leaders (yes, I have particular ones in mind--this is not a sweeping statement) today have a feeling that if they do not plant new churches, franchises if you will, the church will die. I'm not very familiar with their logic or arguments, but I have a gut feeling they are wrong, at least a bit misguided. Now certainly, I don't want the church to die. I want to see churches doing the work of the Kingdom of God. But franchising? Seems more like McChurch, and as most of us know by now, McAnything is not healthy for the body or soul.

It's not even that I don't want churches to grow or expand. However, we must consider what it is we mean by expansion. Empires expand, but they do it by violence, force, and imposing fear. The seeds they sow are those of hate. Corporations expand, but they do it by acquisition, shady deals, corrupt trade and manufacturing practices. They sow seeds for things that will never be harvested in the Kingdom Come. And yet on the day that Peter spoke to the people in Jerusalem on Pentecost roughly two-thousand years ago, three-thousand were added to the number of the fellowship of the Way, heeding the call to exit their corrupt generation. (Acts 2:40-41) But it was not exactly Peter doing the talking. To those with faith, we see that it was the Spirit of God moving and speaking through him. The old Peter, the old Apostles, had died; the new Creation had begun.

And this leads me to my punchline, if you will, the phrase that came to me when I should have been writing a paper: A church that thinks or feels that it must grow or expand probably needs to die first. Churches cannot go on acting like the corrupt generation they come from. They have been called to move out of the way, to allow the Spirit to take the reigns, not the market-mindset. That day of Pentecost and the days following, it was not fancy marketing schemes and cookie-cutter, or even contrived non-cookie-cut buildings, that attracted people and cut them to the heart. It was death and it was new birth. It was sorrow and it was joy. It was the impossibility of the whole situation that made sense. All the logic of empire and power was shown to be false. Only the Crucified could save them, the one who refused to save himself on their behalf. And now we too can choose to not save ourselves, but to be open to death, open to the life of Christ which leads to the cross and saves us from this corrupt generation. And it is through this openness to death that we actually show love and mercy to those corrupted. Our transparency allows others to see the beautiful Triune God that animates our life together. This death to the old and the normal is life anew. It is growth.