10 Principles for Growing a Church (Pt. 1)

Years ago I read Bob Russell's book When God Builds A Church. I remember being really motivated by this book to implement all that I learned. In the book he shares 10 principles that I want to outline over the next few weeks that I believe are critical to the process of building a church as well. I am only sharing his principles but I will share how I see it working out in a real world scenario.

Principle #1: TRUTH

It may seem like a funny place to start but I know more and more that you can't do anything with God unless this is the first step in the process. We live in a day and age when people in the culture no longer fear God. That is solely because churches and pastors have stopped proclaiming the truth of God's Word.

Bob Russell wrote: Truth without love is dogmatism. Love with truth is sentimentality. Speaking the truth in love is Christianity. How true!

We need to balance our approach. We need to speak clearly on issues that our culture would rather us not even speak on at all but we need to do it in a way that earns our hearing. So we need to do it in love. That is hard.

What the church needs now more than ever are not the latest three point steps in living a fulfilled life. We need more than veiled pop-psychology, we need God's sometimes offensive, even abrasive but always relevant truth spoken from our pulpits. We need to use a lot of Scripture when we teach and help people to crave God's Word. We need to instill a desire amongst our people to want more from God's Word.

We need to clearly proclaim that man's ultimate problem is sin. And without Jesus Christ's transformational grace applied to his life then man will spend eternity in a very real place called Hell. We need to have the same mindset as Paul did about preaching in 1 Corinthians 9:16.

What we need right now in the church, now more than ever, is churches that have preachers who will believe the truth, teach the truth and apply the truth. There is no possible way for a church to grow without this element. It is the foundational step to growing.

And it is something that I see as the MOST important step in the process of growing a church.