A NEEDLESS WORRY

One of the greatest worries that church people have about church growth is that we will no longer be a family; we will no longer know “everybody” as we like to put it. The fact is we never did. We never did know everybody in the church if that church had a full-time rector. Early on in my ministry when I served two small missions, there were people in each mission who knew everyone in their little congregation. But not everybody knew everybody. When I moved to a small parish, no one knew everyone. And yet the fear was voiced that we would lose that family atmosphere if the church grew. It was a needless worry and not because we didn’t grow. We did.

Josh Hunt in his book Let Us Grow says this: “Research has demonstrated that in a small church the average person knows about 65 people. In the larger church, also, the average person knows the same number. In other words, the size of the congregation has nothing to do with how many people one knows. The real issue is allowing the gospel to spread wider that any particular circle of friends.”

Isn’t that freeing! We no longer have to be afraid of how big we become. We no longer have to worry about not knowing everyone. We can even admit that we never knew everyone anyway and not feel guilty about it. We did before, didn’t we? We always thought it was somehow a failure on our part if we did not know everyone in the church. We thought it was a flaw of the church if the 8:00 churchgoers did not know the 10:00 churchgoers when, in truth, the 8:00ers did not even know all of the other 8:00ers. The only way that would happen is if the church grows too small and we don’t want that!

The other issuer, as Hunt notes, is that we somehow believe that everyone in church should be a personal friend. That, too, is impossible. What is important is not who we know or how well we know them, but what we have in common. And that which we have in common is our faith in Jesus Christ. That is why we come together each week: to share our faith. If, in the process, we also share family stores and problems, all well and good. But that is not why we gather as a church family. We are a circle of faith, not a circle of friends – first. Faith first; friendship second. That is not to say that we should not invite or friends to join our circle of faith. We should, if they are truly our friends.

Friendship can grow or diminish. Friends can come and go. But faith remains. If Jesus were to inquire about our church family, he would not ask about how friendly we are but how faithful we are. That’s the true test of any parish. We may not know everyone in the directory, only about 65 or so. But we need to know if we are a faithful and faith-filled group of people, even a group of friends as well. We need not worry about the largeness of our congregation but about the largeness of our faith. The more we live out our faith, the more we will grow. It goes with the territory, as they might say. Faith begets faith. It also begets true friendship. That is something for any congregation to truly rejoice in and not worry about, is it not?