Addition Equals Subtraction: Solving For Growth

Mrs. Smith had been a widow for more than 30 years. She and her deceased husband had been good friends for more than 20 years with the pastor and his wife in a small country church. She continued her friendship with them and kept herself busy helping out in the church. She was the organist, Vacation Bible School director, church financial secretary and clerk, Women’s Missionary Union leader, the church librarian and church historian. 

After 55 years at the church, the pastor retired. The church used to be full of children and teens, but now it was mostly senior adults. The church used to have a large choir each Sunday, but now they could only count on a handful of people to sing. The church knew that they needed to find a way to reach young families, so they called a much younger pastor to come and help them.

It only took a few months before the new pastor started to make some changes. The church started doing some community outreach and ministries. They started singing modern songs using guitars and drums. A praise team replaced the choir. New children’s and youth ministries were started. And young families started to attend the church.

After the pastor had been at the church for only six months, the church had grown dramatically. But the older members of the church were not happy. Mrs. Smith approached the pastor to speak on behalf of the older members. She told the pastor that they were glad that younger families were coming to the church, but they felt that the church was changing too much and too fast.

The old pastor was their age and understood them. He enjoyed spending hours just sitting and talking with them. He loved the monthly church meals where they could all reminisce about the “good old days.” He liked the old hymns with piano and organ. He was one of them.

The new pastor was bringing in people that were more like he was. Young, energetic, and wanting to try new and exciting things. The older people just wanted things to be like they were in the past. They wanted a slower-paced, country-style church, not this contemporary-style church that was constantly busy.

And they didn’t like the rough crowds that the pastor was reaching and bringing into their church. People that had never been to church and didn’t know how proper church-going people dressed and talked and acted. People with tattoos and piercings, people that drank alcohol and cussed, people that dressed in jeans and shorts for church, people that came from broken homes, etc.

In short, the older members felt like they had been neglected and many left the church or wanted to. The early church experienced some of these same problems.

In those days, as the number of the disciples was multiplying, there arose a complaint by the Hellenistic Jews against the Hebraic Jews that their widows were being overlooked in the daily distribution. Then the Twelve summoned the whole company of the disciples and said, “It would not be right for us to give up preaching about God to handle financial matters. Therefore, brothers, select from among you seven men of good reputation, full of the Spirit and wisdom, whom we can appoint to this duty. But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the preaching ministry.” The proposal pleased the whole company. So they chose Stephen, a man full of faith and the Holy Spirit, and Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus, a proselyte from Antioch. They had them stand before the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them. So the preaching about God flourished, the number of the disciples in Jerusalem multiplied greatly, and a large group of priests became obedient to the faith. (Acts 6:1-7, HCSB)

As we continue our series “Going Viral” we learn today that typically whenever a church adds new people to the church they risk the chance of subtracting some people as well. New people take time and attention away from those that had been attending for years. They suddenly feel as if they are not as important to the pastor or the church anymore. They see these new people as a problem, rather than as a blessing for their church.

The early church was growing fast and it was facing some serious problems. The first was with poverty. In those times they did not have life insurance, social security, or retirement plans. People were expected to work until they died to provide for themselves, but aging people often reached a point where they could no longer provide for themselves. So it was customary for the families to provide for them financially.

Sometimes there were widows or orphans that had no other family to help them. Add to this the problem that many people had been disowned by their families because they had converted from Judaism to Christianity. That meant that in the early church they had a large problem with poverty.

For the most part the church functioned well when those who had excess helped to provide for those who had a need. However, there was another problem that the church was facing: racism. Jews had been raised to see the world in two classes: those that are Jews and everybody else…or the Gentiles. But the early church had believers that were Aramaic or Hebrew-speaking Jews as well as Greek-speaking Jews together in one place.

The Jews that spoke Hebrew, or more likely Aramaic which was the common language at that time in Israel, saw themselves as first-class citizens of the Jewish faith. When they converted to Christianity they carried that upper-class mentality with them. We do the same in our churches today whether it is race, socio-economic backgrounds, educational backgrounds, or even our past sins. We have the tendency to group people into classes and then we knowingly or unknowingly build a wall bigger and stronger than anything Trump wants to build.

We can lie to ourselves and say that we are not prejudiced, but the truth is that we all judge others based on something. We say that we willingly accept people regardless of their race, sex, nationality, lifestyle, etc. as long as they act like us, but the minute that they act like someone of their race, sex, nationality, or lifestyle we suddenly feel uncomfortable around them.

The early church had an addition problem. If the Apostles had ignored it, they would soon have seen a large subtraction from the church. But if the Apostles spent all their time dealing with these problems, they wouldn’t have had time to tell others about Jesus. The growth of the church would have stopped because they were focused on fixing things rather than telling others what they had seen and heard.

God gave them the wisdom to have the church pray and call out seven men to be servant leaders in the church. These men were to listen to the problems of the church and help find a solution that would honor God and satisfy the needs of their members.

We have some of the same problems in our churches today. How do we handle them? We need to do what the Apostles did in the early church. First, we need to pray for God to give us the wisdom that we need to unleash the best and brightest people among us to tackle the problems at hand.

Poverty is a real problem in our community. Many people do not have the ability to pay their electric bills or rent. Most of us don’t have the money to help with those needs. What will we do as a church when a new member says that they have a need and we cannot help meet it?

Rich Stearns, the president of World Vision said, “Poverty is rocket science.” A simple solution doesn’t exist. We need to pray that God provides people with the head for dealing with the issue of poverty in our community.

Racism and prejudice are issues with a deep-rooted history and a very complex solution. We must pray that God sends us people with a heart for all people so that we can build strong bonds between us all.

Once God sends these people and we call them out to serve the church, we need to give them the responsibility and the authority to make the decisions that will move us in the right direction. None of us can do alone what all of us can do together.

Secondly, we need to make sure that we stay focused on the most important task: go and tell others about Jesus. We will not see the message of Jesus go viral in our community if we focus on all the problems of the church. Our first and most important task must always be that of bringing others to Jesus.

Notice that when the early church got their focus on the right things it says that the preaching flourished and the number of disciples multiplied in Jerusalem. Addition can equal subtraction, but obedience to God equals multiplication.