If you are anything like me, you can experience some of the most joyous of times with your new church plant family and leave that time absolutely destroyed emotionally and spiritually. Why the downturn in emotion? Why the painful self-inflicted lashing? My guess is that you turned on social media where another pastor in the town next door posted everything that was perfect and better than your service or event. My guess is that on your way home you drove home past a church that required a traffic cop to allow all the attendees to leave the parking lot.
Comparisons are brutal to those of us who are pouring our heart out to the Lord in the service of planting His church. Comparisons are sickening to the small church pastor trying to be faithful with what he has been given in a town that others never heard of.
Let me encourage both you and me that God is not honored in unhealthy comparisons. By unhealthy, I mean comparisons that are rooted in only one or two metrics such as numbers and aesthetics.
In the midst of Covid I found myself slowing dying on the vine as many larger and more established churches dove into their financial and human capital to pull off some pretty amazing things during the quarantine. They posted of flatbed trucks that they rented along with outdoor sound equipment to do parking lot worship. Their online worship was prepared by an amazing team of technicians and leaders that would make many MTV videos from the 1980’s look like cartoons.
I sat on my back porch, recorded a sermon, cried when the neighbor blew through with his lawnmower at point number 2 and prayed that God might use it to keep the few faithful people in this church plant from leaving. I’m not proud of my attitude. I wrestled with God a lot during that time. He poured a healing balm on my heart in the form of a reminder that looked a lot like healthy ways to measure your new church health that goes beyond comparisons.
The outgrowth of that time is a book that I hope encourages everyone in the midst of church planting and maybe some pastors of smaller churches as they work faithfully for the kingdom.
You can find “No Ordinary Work: Church Planting in the Shadow of the Church Growth Movement” anywhere you find your online books such as Amazon and Barnes and Noble. May you be encouraged as I was!