When you serve a Lord who said, “whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it,” you have to expect that not everything will work as it might look on the surface.

If we want to get serious about growing our own congregation, the first thing we have to set aside is our desire to grow our own congregation – that is, we can’t measure success by the number of people in the pews.

Growth, instead, has to focus on two things: growing and deepening the discipleship of the people already in our pews, and growing the Kingdom of God – wherever that might be.

Growing the kingdom means inviting people to follow Christ, whether or not their particular path to following Christ will lead them to our congregation or not.

This past Sunday I made one attempt to put this into words in the sermon with a list of seven ways we can work to grow the kingdom. Each of these ways is more individual than organizational, since growth is about people rather than organizations. Our role as a church (of people) is to grow the kingdom. Our role as a church (organization) is to facilitate those efforts.

The seven ways I shared Sunday are:

1. Expand our world. We don’t influence people we don’t know and who don’t know us. The first step in moving beyond our walls is to expand our own circle…this means meeting new people and also deepening relations with people we already know, turning a casual acquaintance into a regular aquaintance, an acquaintance into a friend, a friend into a brother or sister.
2. Understand our world. Christianity introduces us all into a new way of thinking and understanding, but you can’t influence the way someone thinks and understands the world until you know how they see it now. Not everybody thinks like we do and to take someone seriously is to take their worldview seriously, even the parts we can’t share.
3. Pray for our world. Pray for the people around you. I’m not talking about praying for them to change to be like we want them to be, or praying that they’ll shape up (to our preferred form) or praying for them to come to church, but just praying for them. Pray that they are happy. Pray that they will know God. Pray that God will bless their lives. Pray that God gives them his good gifts.
4. Live in our world. We live in fragmented times in a fragmented society. To expand the influence of God’s kingdom into the rest of the world requires the effort to interact with the world. Each of us has interests beyond our faith. Use those interests to build bridges to people you might not otherwise get to know.
5. Love our world. We’re not likely to effectively share God’s love and good gifts with people if we secretly (or openly) believe they aren’t worth either. You have never met, and will never meet, a person who wasn’t created by God and who isn’t loved by God. If that’s not enough of a reason for you to love them, perhaps some deep self-reflection is in order.
6. Invite our world. No, this isn’t about “invite a friend to church.” It’s about inviting people into your life and into your faith journey. It might look like encouraging them to rest, or to spend time with their family, or to rebuild a connection to their own church. If the best approach for a person is to join you, their friend, in your church, great, but that can never be the goal.
7. Disciple our world. Only in the context of a real, continuing relationship on a personal and spiritual level can we effectively help someone grow as a disciple of Jesus Christ and simultaneously allow them to help us grow in our own discipleship. Not every relationship will grow to this point, but every relationship can move toward this point.

Let’s start here.

-Rev. Mark Fleming
markfleming.info