Amongst church planters Easter is what is called a "BIG Day." That means it's a day when we expect to see more people at our worship experiences. We expect our people to actively invite their friends, neighbors, and co-workers to join them. We expect to end the day tired yet fulfilled. Sometimes these things happen. Sometimes they don't.
What BIG days do show us is what I call "reach." Big days show us not the new people visiting for the first time but the people who are sometimes with us and sometimes not. We see the reach of our influence in the lives of people with whom we're connected.
The following blog post is from James Emory White and well worth the read.
[Editor’s Note: This blog was first published in 2012. It has received so much positive feedback that we have decided to offer it again.]
This is a blog with a very specific audience. I know it may exclude some of you, but it may be healthy for you to eavesdrop.
This
is for all the church planters and their volunteers on post-Easter
Monday, struggling to make it from week-to-week, as well as the leaders
and members of established churches which are anything but “mega” – well
below the 200 threshold in terms of average attendance.
I don’t know how Easter Sunday went for you, but I have a hunch.
It
was bigger than normal, but less than breakthrough. It was good, but
not great. Your attendance was large, but not staggering; worth being
happy about, but not writing home about. You are grateful to God, but
now that Easter is over, there’s a bit of a letdown. You wanted so much
more.
It was, in the end, a typical Easter Sunday.
And you are normal.
When
you lead a church, you can't help but dream, and dream big. I think
that’s one of the marks of a leader. But for most, it’s not long before
the dream comes face to face with reality.
When
I planted Meck, I just knew the mailer I sent out (we started churches
with mailers in those days) would break every record of response, and
that we would be a church in the hundreds, if not already approaching a
thousand, in a matter of weeks or months.
Willow Creek? Eat our dust. Saddleback? Come to our conference.
The
reality was starting in a Hilton hotel in the midst of a tropical storm
with 112 dripping wet people, and by the third weekend – through the
strength of my preaching – cutting that sucker in half to a mere 56.
Actually, not even 56, because our total
attendance was 56. This means there were fifteen or twenty kids, so
maybe thirty or so people actually sitting in the auditorium.
(As a good church planter, I think we also counted people who walked slowly past the hotel ballroom doors in the hallway.)
Yes, we’ve grown over the years.
But that’s the point.
It’s taken years.
It usually does.
I
know the soup of the day is rapid growth, but please don’t benchmark
yourself against that. It’s not typical. It’s not even (usually)
healthy. So stop playing that dark, awful game called comparison. It’s
sick and terribly toxic.
Really, stop it.
I
don’t care who you are, there will always be someone bigger or
faster-growing, so why torment yourself? Or worse, fall prey to the sins
of envy and competition, as if you are benchmarked against other
churches?
(Rumor
has it the true “competition” is a deeply fallen secular culture that
is held in the grip of the evil one. Just rumor, mind you.)
The
truth is that on the front end, every church is a field of
dreams. After a few months, or a year or two, it's morphed from a field
of dreams to a field to be worked, and your field may not turn out as
much fruit – much less as fast – as you had hoped.
That’s okay.
You
can rest assured that it probably has little to do with your
commitment, your faith, your spirituality, your call, or God’s love for
you.
I know it’s frustrating. We’ve got a lot of the world in us, and thus look to worldly marks of success and affirmation.
But
what matters is whether you are being faithful, not whether you are
being successful. You’re not in this for human affirmation, but a “well
done” from God at the end.
Did you preach the gospel yesterday?
Then “well done.”
Did you and your team do the best you could with what you had?
Then “well done.”
Did you and your church invite your unchurched friends to attend?
Then “well done.”
Did you pray on the front-end, have faith, and trust?
Then “well done.”
Ignore the megachurches that tweet, blog and boast about their thousands in attendance.
Yep, even mine.
It’s
not that we don’t matter. We do, and we’re very proud of the hard work
of our volunteers and the lives we have the privilege of
changing. There’s a place for us.
It’s just that you matter, too.
And you may need to remember that.
And perhaps most of all on the Monday after Easter.
James Emery White
