Is “I Want a Bigger Church” a Red flag, or No?
One pastor says the desire for a bigger church is a red flag; it’s carnal. Another will say that church growth is a sign of health, and should be expected. Neither asks what’s beneath the desire. WHY do you want a bigger church?
Over the years, I've talked to hundreds of pastors, and church growth is a conversation that happens repeatedly. I'm hearing two major opinions on the desire for a bigger church.
- One camp says your desire for a bigger church is a red flag, a sign that your priorities are off, and that you're pandering to the masses. Most likely, you've also tied your worth to your metrics. Fix your ego. Stop performing.
- A second camp says growth comes with health. That if you genuinely love people and love the Gospel, you want to see more lives changed. A bigger church means more folks encountering Jesus. Don't apologize for wanting more.
There's wisdom in the warning against ego-driven growth. The pressure to perform is brutal, and it is a grind. I have lived it.
And the Kingdom growth framing is also on to something. There's a genuine, God-given longing that comes with loving people. You want others to find what you've found.
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Both camps have something valid, but in my opinion, both camps miss a crucial piece.
Embracing a John 7 Lens
In John 7:37-38, Jesus stands up in the middle of a religious festival and shouts:
Let anyone who is thirsty come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me… rivers of living water will flow from within them.
If anyone thirsts. There are no qualifiers on that. ANYONE. Pastor, parishioner, staff, volunteer, lay pastor... anyone. And Jesus doesn't say "if anyone thirsts for good things" either. If anyone (at all) thirsts (at all, for anything), come to Me and drink.
Pastor, your longing for more influence, more impact, more people in seats is a thirst. And Jesus has something to say about thirst. He doesn't say your thirst is bad or tell you to want less.
Jesus says, 'Come to Me, and drink.'
Jesus promises to satisfy your thirst for a bigger church, for more influence, for a healthier church culture.
The desire for a bigger church is thirst aimed at an outcome instead of a source.
Joshua GOrdon
He's not handing out giant gallon jugs of living water. He's not promising to give you church metrics that make you feel significant. He does something stranger and better: he makes you a spring.
"Rivers of living water will flow from within them."
A spring doesn't measure its output. It doesn't need to know how many gallons it produced last Sunday or whether another larger spring down the street is outpacing it. It flows because it's connected to a source.
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His job and yours.
Your job is to come to Jesus, drink deeply, and let the Holy Spirit move through your preaching, your presence, and your pastoral care. That's it. That's the whole assignment.
His job is to determine the boundaries, scope, and reach of what comes out of that. He decides the size of the stream.
When a pastor takes that thirst for a bigger church to Jesus, and finds that need met in Christ, the pressure to manufacture growth vanishes. Growth still matters, but manufacturing it is no longer their problem.
You can shepherd the people in front of you, preach as if three people in the front row matter as much as three thousand online, and stop performing for the metric.
The real danger is misdirected thirst.
When you drink from the well of attendance figures, comparison, and platform size, you'll always be thirsty again. The metric never satisfies. There'll always be a church growing faster, a pastor with a bigger reach, a Sunday that fell short of last month's high.
When you drink from Jesus, the outcome is genuinely his to carry.
The thirst gets satisfied and the ministry gets freed. More often than not, the growth follows, not because you engineered it but because you were a spring.