In the first years of my ministry, I gobbled up all I could chew with this type of propaganda. It’s not like seminary. Seminary is the time for translating ancient languages, delving deep into scripture, learning about the appropriate concepts of pastoral care, and studying the broad spectrum of theology. The educators at theological schools don’t give you much practical advice for “growing the church” which is exactly what congregations want to know about when the new pastor first steps onto their turf. They want to know what you’re going to do to bring in people and their wallets. They also want to know that you’re not going to make them change too much to get that to happen. They want things the same, but different - bigger, more secure, and certainly more attractive than the church down the street. And they want it all as cheaply as they can get it.

Maybe this isn’t true absolutely everywhere, but it’s certainly true in enough places that there are volumes upon volumes dedicated to answering the question that I started with, “How do you grow the church?”

Though perhaps it’s more understated here, the question is still on our minds at First Presbyterian Church. We may not be the most evangelical congregation ever, but we still wonder how to be attractive and welcoming to new people. We wonder about the ability of our budget to either stretch or grow to meet the needs of our church before deep and painful cuts must be made in program or staff. We calculate the costs of heating and cooling systems against the kind of ministries and mission projects we want to do. We want to see more kids and their parents in worship. We want the money to roll in without having to increase our own pledges by more than a few bucks a week. We want people to come to faith but we don’t want to have to share our own doubts and discouragements along that common road.

We want our church to grow, but how? What will it take? Will the cost be too high? Will we give up before we get any traction? Is there a gimmick out there that would work for us?

I’m not a big believer in the gimmicks. Style, and form, and politics are not the most relevant things to pay attention to in my book. I think that traditional or contemporary, formal or informal, liberal or conservative are not the benchmarks for who will see their pews full on Sunday morning and who won’t. I do, however, think that those things are noticed when people are choosing the type of church they want to try. They may not be though the reasons that people choose to stay and become part of a family of faith.

What can bond people to a community of followers is something different, something that can’t be bought, or sold, or marketed in a nice neat package for the cost of 5 DVD’s and an “I live the Purpose-Driven Life” T-shirt. Churches really do need help in seeing their own mishaps and noting their own successes along the way, but what they don’t need is a “one-size-fits-all” sort of formula for doing church. We’ve been down that road. It doesn’t work. Communities have personalities, their own strengths and weaknesses, and yes, even a spirit about them as attested to by the messages to the “angels” of the early churches in the book of Revelation. Congregations have their own unique attributes, so when they try to tell a new pastor not to mess with them too much, they really do have something important to say. Far too many pastors go for the hype first and learning about their congregations later. That part needs to change. Trust has to be built before pastor and congregation can determine some positive steps toward growth together.

But if we’re going to be the church, the growing church at that, pastors and congregations are going to need to be mindful of their futures. How do we do that? How do we pay attention to God’s work in our midst? How do we align ourselves with God’s plan, and what if that plan is more about pruning than it is about new growth? We don’t always know who to trust – the enthusiastic pastor who wants to move forward now, or the wise elder who wants us to consider all our options first. Even though the formulas are out there that say they know, they don’t really know as much as they think they know. I’m always a bit skeptical of the answers that come neatly in a box.

That’s why I love scripture so and fall back on the obsessively traditional training I received in seminary. Scripture is never neat, nor can it easily be tied up into a box. Just when we think we know what God is doing, God does something totally out of our realm of belief. The book of Acts is one of the great books about being the church. More so than being about the life of Jesus or the chronicles of Israel’s history, this book is about becoming the entity of the church, the Body of Christ in the world, the collection of people who would follow in the Way that Jesus set before us. In total, we get 28 chapters of the unexpected. It includes conflict, the kind of conflict that churches seem so good at even today. Not even a full generation after Jesus’ death and resurrection believers are asking, “Who do we follow now?” Is it Peter, the rock of the church, the one who couldn’t even say he knew Jesus when the chips were down? Is it Saul who tied up, tried, convicted, and murdered Christians for the sake of the religious good? Is it appropriate to demand circumcision of Gentile converts, to eat meat sacrificed to idols? And the arguments begin well before we thought they would.

It goes without saying that people were not all that different then than they are now. We find different topics to grind our axes on, but it’s the same old, same old. Religious leaders are still human, churches are still human institutions. We can’t possibly say what exactly will grow the church. Sometimes we look at the trends and wonder, “Is it the church with the best coffee that wins?” Sarcasm aside, all we can do is try to follow Christ’s imperatives and hope something good comes out of it. Really we ought to be stunned that Christianity survived past the pages of the book we call holy at all.

But survive it did. Through some pretty crummy periods of being Christians too! All in all, we don’t have a good track record for really being the loving people that Jesus wanted us to be. If it isn’t fostering petty arguments, it’s subscription to “right” ways of thinking, or at times even mass torture or war against those who are not of our same religious persuasion. Sometimes those churches grew too. The church was at one of its high points numerically when Constantine ordered that his subjects would either be Christian or dead. And here we thought the mega-church movement was evil!

But being that the Session has committed our church to thinking about growth in the upcoming year, and that I myself have encouraged that commitment, I do think we can do something more than play numbers games. The growth we want to pay attention to is the growth that is unexpected, the growth that seems like it could only come from God alone. That’s when the Bible does a big, “Huh, look at that!” It happens in verse 31 of the scripture passage we read today. This lesson is about Saul, the guy who killed Christians for sport. He has this weird experience of Jesus on the road to Damascus, and his life gets a big switcheroo. He answers, “Here I am Lord,” and God sends him to do the unthinkable, to become the propagator of churches and congregations throughout much of the Mediterranean. The disciples don’t want to trust him, and who could blame them? The background checks on this particular pastor raise some serious red flags. The Jews no longer want him since he turned his back on Jewish purity. The new churches think he’s a bit nuts. But then there’s the big, gargantuan turn of the story. The text says MEANWHILE, and Cade even has a favorite book that notes this as a turning point transition for any story.

It says, MEANWHILE, the church throughout Judea, Galilee, and Samaria had peace and was built up. Say what? The church grew! The church grew when the greatest persecutor of the church decided to lead it? The church grew when they were afraid of every side being against them? The church grew in spite of dumb conflicts and embarrassing religious leaders? The church grew without a plan and without a hope to go on?

This, my friends, is testament to the fact that God must somehow, and in some way be involved with the growth of our faith. Some churches grow even with circumstances we’d find totally strange, some wither on the vine and cling to the last brown leaf before they’ll die. Is it that faithfulness is luck of the draw? Is it that we shouldn’t even ask questions about numbers or budgets, or the things of this world? Is it that God is concerned about something other than our comfort and security?

Again, I don’t have all the answers. I go back and forth on this myself. I want us to be reaching out, reaching deeper, monitoring our contributions to each other and to the world, and yet I don’t want to do this just so we’ll make budget, or so our neighbors will approve, or so that it looks like there are a few people who actually listen when I’m up here talking. My ego likes those things, but doesn’t need those things. What I do hope that we do, constantly, diligently, is pay attention to the story, to where God is increasing the numbers. The story tells us that when those few early disciples were living in fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, the church increased in numbers. We sometimes do the opposite. We think we’re in the comfort of the Lord, so we fear the Spirit’s movement among us. We get too complacent with where we are and fail to see what God wants us to become. Many of you know my favorite charge to use as you are sent back into the world from this place: Love God so much that you love nothing else too much, and fear God enough that you fear nothing else at all. We actually need to be afraid of not doing our part. We need to tremble at the thought that we might not be giving ourselves completely to the Christian life – and that means doing things like telling our neighbors about our faith or giving to the furthering of God’s reign in the world. But we also need to be comforted in knowing that the Spirit will not blow us off course. The Spirit’s lead may be hard to follow. She inspires the unlikely to action, and it’s easy to let ourselves be forced into the lowest common denominator rather than pay attention to the brave and the bold. Live in the fear of the Lord and the comfort of the Holy Spirit. Do this, and God may just increase our numbers as well.

Amen.