What is your church really made of? Or perhaps better said, who is your church really made of? This is something we all do well to ponder from time to time, for there are good ways and bad ways, better ways and worse ways to fill a church.
The best way to fill a church is by seeing the lost get saved. This involves the children of church members growing up and putting their faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and it involves evangelizing the community so unsaved people hear the gospel and become believers. Wonderful.
The worst way to fill a church is to undermine and destroy other healthy churches and compel the Christians within them to come to yours instead. In the end, one church has died and another has grown fat by plundering it. Evil.
But there is a middle ground as well. It is not necessarily the worst way to fill a church but it is also not the best. It has been my experience and observation that many churches see their most substantial growth not by salvations but by transfers—by slowly drawing people from a variety of other nearby congregations. This was certainly and demonstrably true of the church growth movement but I fear it may also be true of Reformed churches.
We need to acknowledge that there are often very good reasons for transfer growth. Perhaps a family has moved from one city to another or perhaps a church they attended nearby has decided to close its doors. Perhaps they were true believers who realized they were in a false church and for the sake of their souls needed to move on. Or perhaps a core theological conviction changed and they decided they needed to politely slip away. Well and good.
More often, though, Christians move from church to church on the basis of matters that are less significant. They move because their previous church lacks a certain amenity or ministry. They move because they prefer the preaching or the music. They move because of relatively minor points of doctrine. They move on the basis of preference more than necessity.
I am not saying this is necessarily wrong. It’s possible that most of us have at one time or another left a church not because it was false or heretical but because another one seemed like it would better serve us or better align with our convictions. So I am not saying transfer growth is intrinsically evil.
But what I am saying is that it can be deceptive and can mimic a sign of health. Therefore, a church should check itself from time to time to consider the nature of its growth. That’s because a church can gain size and, therefore, have an appearance of health even when it is evangelistically lazy and disobedient. It can be a church that grows and thrives at the expense of other churches rather than a church that grows by saving the lost.
God’s Kingdom doesn’t grow when we transfer members from that church to this one. We wouldn’t think much of the farmer who boasted of the size of his flock if we knew he had been hauling them over the top of the neighbor’s fence. We wouldn’t honor the angler who catches fish from a stocked pond when he claims he has been catching them from wild rivers.
We wouldn’t think much of the farmer who boasted of the size of his flock if we knew he had been hauling them over the top of the neighbor’s fence.
What I fear we like to do in Reformed churches is cast our line into other church’s ponds. We cast it this way to draw a Presbyterian, cast it that way to draw a Baptist, and cast it a third way to lure someone who is Anglican, Brethren, or Dutch Reformed. We save people from the clutches of Arminius as much as the clutches of Satan and deliver them from the wrong position on the millennium more than from unbelief. We lure them with our worship or ministries or theological distinctions rather than the gospel. We entice them based on our adherence to whatever is popular in a Christian subculture at any given time—hymnody, liturgy, expository preaching, gospel-centeredness, and so on. We build our churches out of other churches.
Again, this is not necessarily wrong. A person who comes to embrace the Five Points should probably make their way to a Reformed church. A person who embraces cessationism will probably need to leave a church that is committed to prophecy. And then there is depth to the Reformed faith that is often lacking in other traditions and therefore attractive to those who have begun to grow in their faith. We understand this. But the church receiving such new members should be aware that they have not delivered souls from death but merely helped existing Christians mature.
The fact is, growing through transfers can mimic growing through evangelism. And if the Reformed tradition already struggles with faithfully sharing the gospel compared to many others—and I think it does—we need to doubly guard ourselves against being content to add members without baptisms, to add seats without salvations, to grow without evangelism.
The Apostle Paul refused to build on another person’s foundation, but we sometimes delight to. We take it as a mark of a healthy church that people want to join it and that may be true. But we cannot be truly healthy unless we are fulfilling the Great Commission which is not a call to go to the churches but to the nations and not a call to glean among the sheaves but to glean in the farthest of fields.
This was inspired, in part, by the writing of De Witt Talmage.
