From the Home Place

Good morning. Today’s weather will be cool, cloudy and windy. At 4 a.m. the temperature is at 37, headed for 56 for a high. In another words, today’s weather will be more normal than the last two days have been.

Miss Deb and I were in Denver on Friday and Saturday. Oh my, I don’t understand why folks would ever choose to live in that place. On our way down on Friday, we sat in stop-and-go traffic for an extra 45 minutes. Yesterday it took us an hour to go two miles! The traffic is horrendous, the drivers tend to be rude and the smog was awful. Perhaps it is easier to say it this way, everything that Denver is, Lusk is not. I’ll take a small town over the big city most any day.

We traveled to Denver to attend then annual conference of the Converge Rocky Mountain District. That is the group of folks we are affiliated with as our ministry partners. Miss Deb and I have served alongside these folks for more than 30 years now. What a great team! Our key-note speaker for the two-day conference was a man who shared great insight in helping us better understand some of the dynamics of being a small church.

In America today, the average church has less than 60 folks in regular attendance, compared to t he larger church with its thousands of attendees. For years, our culture has been so focused upon numbers, with bigger always being better, that we have caused many of God’s great little churches to feel like there is something wrong with them because that church doesn’t seem to grow much numerically.

Our speaker, Karl Vater, helped each of us understand that whether large or small, a church can still be successful or unsuccessful. Numerically, most of our churches in Wyoming would be considered small. Yet, as Miss Deb and I have visited several of these “small” churches, we have been blessed to see those small churches impacting their community in big ways.

Regardless of size, the local church is supposed to help people come to Jesus, to “grow in the grace and the knowledge of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and to provide an environment where people can enjoy fellowship with believers as they positively impact the lives of those who don’t know Jesus as Savior yet. Both big and small churches are to be busy about God’s work here on earth.

My favorite statement made by Mr.Vater, was that “there is not one problem within the local church of any size that biblical discipleship will not fix.” And therein lies the issue for any church that is struggling to survive – a lack of biblical discipleship.

We were challenged to quit looking at numbers as a measure of “success,” and to determine the success of the local church by asking the question, “Are we making mature disciples of Jesus Christ?” If so, our local church is successful in God’s eyes, yet if we are just attending church, with little impact upon the community around us, we are less than God wants us to be.

In my opinion, for too many years the local church has believed that information equals transformation. It does not! Think of the hundreds, or possibly thousands of hours you have spent listening to sermons and Sunday School lessons. The hours upon hours in “Bible studies,” which are usually a study of some book rather than the Bible. Have all of those hours of information transformed your life? Are you way more like Jesus today than you were five to ten years ago? Are you a mature disciple of Jesus Christ, consistently advancing His kingdom within your community? If so, praise God, you are attending a very successful church, large or small.

But if the above statement is not true for you and those who attend the church you attend, perhaps you need to reevaluate your disciple making process. Regardless of your church size numerically, is it being successful? Is your local church developing life-changing disciples? I don’t know, but perhaps Jesus had the best “church growth strategy” ever developed when He said, “go and make disciples.”

Remember our conversation a few weeks ago when we talked about the fact that information usually causes us to become prideful, as stated in Proverbs. Hopefully you recall this equation, “Information without Application = Inflation.” Our ego soon becomes inflated if all we do is gather information about any topic, including gaining biblical information. We must correctly Apply said Information before it will equal Transformation! As I have stated before, “Wisdom is the proper application of information.”

Summary, it doesn’t matter if you attend a “Denver” sized church, or if you attend a “Lusk” sized church, what matters is your answer to the question – “Is my church helping me to become a better disciple of Jesus Christ?” If your answer is “Yes!” then even a small church numerically is having a BIG impact for the Kingdom!

Making disciples with you, Neal