Little kids want to be big. They play dress up and put on Grandpa’s shoes. Young ones attempt to ride a bigger bike. They pretend to be teachers, firefighters, doctors, and Olympians. Children stretch and stand on tiptoes, hoping to extend their reach.
This time of year, I’m always reminded – my kids are bigger. As we gather with family for holiday celebrations, many of them comment on how tall they’ve become or ask about college plans. As they try on winter clothes from last year, they don’t fit! They’ve grown. I should have noticed from the marks on our wall.
In our home, we make pencil marks on the wall separating the living room and dining room. It’s a homemade growth chart, one of the many ways to measure how we grow. Every couple of months, our kids stand tall and we mark their height.
Even big kids, like us, want to grow. We want to be smarter, stronger, and more disciplined. We strive to be more emotionally and financially stable. But it isn’t so easy to track our progress. There must be more than our bank accounts and degrees to help us calculate our maturation.
It becomes even more difficult for church congregations. All too often, we tend to chart our progress by looking at membership and budgets. It is important to have an eye on these gauges, but what if we measured our growth beyond viewing the numbers? What if we looked past attendance and the annual budget as signals of health? What if we recognized the Church as the living organism that it is, rather than only brick and mortar?
Frank Viola is quick to point out, “In the minds of the early Christians, the people – not the architecture – constituted a sacred space…nowhere in the New Testament do we find the terms church (ekklesia), temple, or house of God used to refer to a building. To the ears of a first-century Christian, calling an ekklesia (church) a building would have been like calling your wife a condominium or your mother a skyscraper… ekklesia always refers to an assembly of people, not a place.”
So when we talk about growth in the Church, we are speaking of so much more than bodies in the pews or dollars in the plate. We’re talking about the people of God. We are pointing toward the ways that the Holy Spirit helps us expand our knowledge and interaction with all of God’s creatures and creation.
As you look to the New Year, how would you like to grow and what does it look like? Maybe you hope to spend more time grounded in the pages of the Bible or wish that you could greet a little one by name. Make it happen! How often do you see someone leaving church alone, while you head to lunch with friends? Invite them to join you. What about filling an empty notebook with names of loved ones as you pray for them or serving in a new capacity once a month?
Ephesians 2 says, “You are citizens with the saints and also members of the household of God…In [Christ] the whole structure is joined together and grows into a holy temple in the Lord; in whom you also are built together spiritually into a dwelling-place for God.”
How would you like to grow spiritually and how will you chart your growth? How can we encourage and support each other as we reach for a new height? When we grow in God, we grow together in Christ.
Growing with you,
Pastor Lowell