What if every other church grows except you?’ This was the question I felt God asked me the other day as I sat in a local community praying. It was followed with the thought, ‘what if one particular church grows to be very large because of your work with people in the community?’

It was a question of God’s kingdom verses my Kingdom, a question I’m not encountering for the first time. As a pastor, you instinctively want to see God’s kingdom grow, but it can be easy to mistake your church for the entirety of God’s kingdom. It’s one of the hardest things to do, to see your ministry complementing the work of the Spirit in a community, and not competing with other churches for ‘bums on seats‘.

We realised early on that if we approached things this way it would kill us and the plans God has for us. To grapple with it we decided to flip our model from a come to us approach, and replacing it with a go to them approach. Both models are fine but we felt deep in our spirit’s that a sign of the effectiveness of our presence in the local community was that all other churches benefitted as well. Maybe even instead of. Yes, even instead of.

In other words, shouldn’t we all rise with the tide?

I see it a lot with many other church plants, asking the question, how can we encourage people to come to us? 

In Jesus I see the reverse. He went to people and told them about what God was up to and encouraged them to join in. In our current culture if we are to be successful at this we need to equip our people to be missionaries. People who are missionaries in their work place, in the community and in their families.

So this is what we’re going to do.

We legitimately want to see people who don’t know Jesus, meet him and get plugged into a church that feels like home to them. That may be with us, but of the communities we are going to establish ourselves in, we pray it won’t be just us.

Timothy Keller speaks of a tipping point for Christianity in our cities being at 15%. He says when this number of people regularly engage in Christian community and discipleship, across our city, then we will start to see some incredible things happening.

My gut feeling is that it’s not healthy for a single church to be responsible for 15% of the christians in a city. This is why God has and is continuing to establish such wide variety of churches across our city, that there might be a home and place for everyone.

So our focus is how can we do what we can to see 15% of a city’s population fall in love with Jesus, follow him and worship together somewhere.

It’s very exciting and freeing to be involved in a breathtaking vision such as this!