Blog
“Church Growth or Kingdom Growth?”
Categories: Bulletin Articles, M. W. Bassford
As was the case for many Christians, when I was growing up, I was taught that the kingdom of heaven/the kingdom of God was the church. When I got older, I learned (first and most notably from a sermon that David Maravilla preached in Columbia, MO nearly 25 years ago now) that the truth is more nuanced. It’s better to define the kingdom as the rule or dominion of God. When we do so, many of Jesus’ teachings about the kingdom take on a deeper meaning.
This is the case in Matthew 13:31-33. In this text, Jesus compares the kingdom to two things: a mustard seed and leaven. The “mustard seed” parable is very churchy. The church starts out little and gets big. Its growth is obvious to all.
However, the church doesn’t fit quite so neatly into the parable of the leaven. In that parable, the kingdom is invisible and exerts an invisible influence that only can be detected indirectly. Only when we understand the kingdom in a broader sense does this begin to make sense. Sometimes, the growth of God’s dominion in the human heart is not obvious at all. You can only see it by the changes it produces in the lives of the converted.
In our increasingly secular age, there is a great emphasis on church growth. Americans love things that can be measured and counted, so to us, it seems reasonable that the best measure of the health of a church is the increasing numbers of those in attendance on Sunday morning. There is truth to this—after all, the mustard seed is supposed to grow and become a tree.
However, we need to pay as much attention to the invisible growth of the kingdom too. Many times, brethren take this kind of growth for granted. The church has assembled, its members have heard the word, so perforce they must have been edified, right?
Not necessarily. As the Lord points out in the parable, inward change begets outward change. If Christians aren’t living differently than they were five years ago, or ten years ago, they have not given more of their hearts over to God’s dominion either. Church cliché to the contrary, they have not, in fact, been built up. This is a dismayingly common problem. Though we love to bemoan the difficulties of evangelism, true edification is every bit as difficult.
In our work, then, we must be concerned not merely with church growth, but with kingdom growth. The goal of our assemblies must be to increase the dominion of God in the heart of every member through exposure to the gospel, and every element of our assemblies must be calculated to achieve that goal.
It’s not enough for our hymns to be fun to sing. They must enlighten and inspire. It’s not enough for our sermons to be easily digestible and amusing. They must remind us of our calling and our hope.
Kingdom growth isn’t easy, any more than training for a marathon is, and for much the same reasons. It demands a great deal from church leaders and church members alike. However, its consequences will be profound, and they will make themselves known in any number of unexpected ways. Not least, once we get kingdom growth down, it’s likely that we will start to see more church growth too.
