Where is everybody?
Senior Pastors are funny creatures. They can’t walk into an auditorium without moving a few chairs. And they’re incapable of meeting new people on a Sunday without saying, “there’s usually more people than this.”
I jest but there’s some truth behind this. It comes back to the way churches have idolised large gatherings as a sign of a good church. We equate the value of a pastor with the size of their building. And perhaps most damagingly of all, we have mistaken the size of a gathering as a measure of spiritual health. It just isn’t true.
It will come as no surprise that there are fewer people gathering on Sundays across The Street than there used to be. The causes include people moving away from Wellington, people staying away for health reasons and people who have broken out of the habit of gathering or drifted away all together. It’s alleviated in some part by the strength of our Life Groups and it’s important that all of us play a part in encouraging those who’ve drifted to return.
But the reality is that our services tend to be smaller and more stripped back than they used to be. Night have even been working on alternating between large Sunday gatherings and services in homes. I know some of us are still grieving the way we used to gather in large numbers (unless you were trying to park!) and you’re desperate for us to build something back up like The Street in 2019.
Let's celebrate and remember fondly what has gone before, but can I gently give you three reasons why the future looks different for us:
We can’t go back
Covid has been a disruption that has affected just about every area of life in our nation. The church is a body of people, not a robot. As people, we have been affected by Covid and trying to simply “go back to what was” would be like an office forbidding people to work from home. Times have changed.
We don’t want to go back
Someone said to me recently that Covid was a stress-test on discipleship. We were found wanting. We have to become a church of resilient disciples who are able to stand, grow and multiply even in adverse circumstances, and deep community is needed to help that happen.
We don’t need to go back
We have a vision to see 1% of Wellington become baptised followers of Jesus. We can make the mistake of thinking this would be easier if we had lots and lots of people. I love the story of Gideon (Judges 6-7) and how when faced with a vast army beyond counting, God whittled his army of 32,000 (which was clearly too small already) down to 300. God won the victory easily with 300 and it is this victory that is used as a picture of how God would one day send a baby to defeat sin and death - Jesus! He is the only one who can save so many people and build us up into a movement of resilient multiplying disciples.
Can I invite you on the journey? Not back to what we loved before but onwards and upwards into what God knows is needed now.
Much love,
Simon
This post is part of the Senior Pastor’s weekly blog. Go to the blog feed >>