« Making Your Small Group Sustainable for the Future | Main | Friday Flashback: Networking or Neighboring? »
March 24, 2010
Your Spiritual Growth Plan
Developing life in the Spirit is a customized process.
Note: This is a preview of an article written by John Ortberg for Leadership Journal. It has very real application for small groups, so we encourage you to give the full article a read by clicking the link below.
A man I'll call Paul (because that's actually his name) told me he recently started going to church. In his mid-seventies, with no faith background, he woke up one morning with a sudden urge to hear the pope, and that launched him on a journey that led a few months later to a Presbyterian church and then to a commitment to follow Jesus. Every week he comes to church and marvels at all he gets to learn about prayer and worship and faith.
A man I'll call Ralph (not his real name) told me recently how he stopped going to church. I have known him for decades. He is a well-known pastor and speaker. He still believes in God. He meets with some like-minded friends on Sunday evening to talk and pray together. But he got burned out on the local church—it came to feel to him like a relentless drive for numbers and success and program and hype. He told me that the people in his little house group are long-time church people, most of them former church staff members.
Paul and Ralph exemplify a dynamic just beneath the surface in many churches. People who are new to the church often grow the quickest and appreciate it the most. But people who have been around a while, those who know the church best and have served the longest, often feel the least helped and the most used.
This was confirmed by the Reveal study. It found that at a certain point of spiritual development, increased involvement in church activities ceases to correlate to perceived spiritual growth.
So You Don't Want to Go to Church Anymore became a best-seller and launched a national conversation. David Kinnaman released a study from the Barna Group that found that most people believed spiritual growth consists of trying hard to follow the rules in the Bible, which meant that people said (not surprisingly) they don't grow because they lack motivation.
Those of us who work in churches do it because we believe in the power of God to change lives: "we will in all things grow up into him who is the Head, that is Christ" (Eph. 3:15).
When that does not happen, we begin to die a little, even if the church is increasing numerically. Of course, we can't make growth happen. But just as doctors do with children when their growth is stunted, we can look for the conditions that lead best to growth, and ask if they're present in our churches. I'm thinking a lot these days about why many churches aren't growth-nurturing communities. Often it's the wrong message, the wrong measure, and the wrong means.
Click here to continue reading on LeadershipJournal.net.
posted by Sam O'Neal on March 24, 2010 7:00 AM
