Aug 02, 2024 |
WLSU, Growing In Love
| The Rev. Philip DeVaul
WLSU, Growing In Love
I wrote in a recent blog post that historically I have been obsessed with numbers as a church leader. Many of us are. We talk about church growth, and we are almost always talking about literally increasing the number of people associated with our community. And I understand that. I can’t totally disown it. If we believe that what we’re doing matters, that it makes an impact, and that our community can transform people’s lives, why would we not want to increase the number of people who experience that?
But this is not the growth we are talking about in baptism. In baptism, we are talking not about numerical growth, but about our maturity, our development, our spiritual growth alongside and towards one another as we see more clearly how to love like God loves. It is totally fine to love baptism because it means new members of our church. But I hope we can see past that as well and recognize that these babies, these nascent humans, these brand-new Christians, are pushing us to grow, to develop, to mature. God put them in our lives on purpose. How will we respond to that? How will we let them shape us? What will we learn from them about Jesus? How will we grow together?
We talk about growth in our Vision Statement. There’s a whole bullet point dedicated to it, and we will be focusing on that bullet point throughout this program year. In it we say that we envision a church that is “Growing with people of every age, race, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic situation, and political persuasion.” We wrote that four years ago, and I will freely admit that when we wrote it, I was thinking about numbers. I was thinking about increasing the number of people that are connected to Church of the Redeemer. But the language we used pushes us beyond that. When we say we want to grow not only in number but in the type and age and experience and perspective of our membership, we are saying we want our understanding of who we are to grow. We are talking about the growth, development, and maturity of how and where we see love.
