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Sermon Illustrations: Church Growth
Anecdotes
You can’t preserve the past and expect to go to a new place of health in the future. Tony Morgan The Unstuck Church
Are numbers important? Imagine this: A couple goes to the beach with their three children. During the course of the day, all of their children go missing. They search everywhere and finally find two of them. The husband turns to his wife and says, "Okay, let's go." She says, "We can't go yet. We've only got two of our kids." He says, "Doesn't matter. Numbers aren't important."
Spurgeon said, "By faith the walls of Jericho fell down. By faith the walls of this church will be pushed back." The deacons talked to him afterwards and told him he was presumptuous, being only a young man. But during his ministry the walls were pushed back three times.
A newborn baby that never grows is an unhealthy baby. You want to see that baby grow into a toddler, a child, a youth, a man or woman. And if it doesn't, you start to get worried. Because that sickness will result in that baby's being a perpetual burden on others.
Cho used to sit in his lecturers' classes and he would constantly have the desire to have the world's largest church. His first meeting had six people.
Quotes
Like people, churches have a life cycle. In general, a church is born and over time it grows. Eventually it reaches a plateau, and if nothing is done to move it off that plateau, it begins to decline. If nothing interrupts the decline, it will die. Advanced Strategic Planning: A 21st-Century Model for Church and Ministry Leaders Aubrey Malphurs
If you're expecting your church to grow by people having their steering wheel turned supernaturally, you're going to have a very small church. Peter Youngren
Are numbers importatnt? Of course they are! God even wrote a whole book on it.
If you sell 100 Holdens [an Australian car] and one month later only five are still on the road, what kind of business are you running? Peter Youngren on retention of new converts.
A church that grows larger only by transfers from other churches is not experiencing genuine growth - it is only reshuffling the card deck.1
Just because something's growing, doesn't mean something's not cancerous. Mark T. Barclay
The best marketing principle: someone likes your product and tells someone else about it. Mark Ramsay
The chances of a family attending church if a child is converted is 3.5%. If the mother is converted, it's 17%. If the father is converted, it's 93%.
The church that doesn't want to grow is telling the world: We are having such a good time over here, the rest of you can go to hell. Kong Hee
New construction is always easier than renovation.2
A great deal more failure is the result of an excess of caution than of bold experimentation with new ideas. The frontiers of the Kingdom of God were never advanced by men and women of caution. J. Oswald Sanders
1 Warren, Rick The Purpose Driven Church p50
2 Smith, J.K.A. Who's Afraid of Postmodernism?