Challenges of a Growing Church

Anyone who has been to BCBC lately knows that we continue to grow. At this point we are starting to actually have discussions about moving to two services. This is not something I am excited about, but with us running out of seats, we may have no choice if the current trends continue. That is not the subject of this blog post though. I want to talk about the implications of the growth that we have been experiencing. Obviously we have been watching God really blessing us for the last three years as growth has been steady. I think that two of the causes (within God's blessing) of why we are growing are: 1)the expansion of the children's ministry. and 2)decentralization and partnership. One of my goals from day one has been to spread the leadership and ministry work out to a broad range of people. I cannot and should not be doing everything myself. As a result of more people being involved in and responsible for the work, more is getting done. There is still much more to do and we need to continue to involve more people, but we have come a long way. This has resulted in many great things happening at church, many of which are not my fault! :) An outgrowth of this is that our need for people is expanding too. With all the new people, we need more people to be involved in reaching out and building relationships with people. The small groups are helping with this, but that is not enough by itself. We need to continue to grow in reaching out and connecting to the new people who keep appearing at church. It is only as we connect to them and build relationships with them that they will get integrated into the family. This is too big of a job for any one or two people. It is something we all must challenge ourselves with. I look forward to what God is going to do as we do better and better at following up with all the new people that are coming in and in turn train them to help us with those who come after.