What only God can do.

 

When I was a pastor in Fort Thomas, we had the two biggest years of numerical growth the church had experienced in almost 40 years.

I cannot say this to brag. This growth was not because of me. I did however, suggest that they join me in doing one thing.

This one thing was the only thing we did. I must tell you first, what we did not do.

We did not buy a canned evangelism program.

We did not canvass the neighborhood.

We did not advertise.

We did not send out mailers.

We did not have a “Bring a Friend Sunday.” (Actually we did, but only one person brought their cousin. Period.)

We did not have an evangelism committee.

We did not purchase a list of new residents to the area and contact them.

We did not “train the greeters” “how to welcome people.” (In fact we eliminated them.)

We did not vote on a proposal at the Board meeting about growing as a church.

In fact, this effort was so subtle, that when I reported this fact to the Board two years later, a Board member challenged me that this was untrue.

But it was. We had just experienced the largest two years of growth in the congregations history since about 1960.

What did we do? What is the ONLY explanation for what happened?

I invited people to pray for God to lead the people who needed to be at First Christian to be there.

We did not pray for exponential growth, nor did we pray for certain kinds of people or families or youth or any other category of people to come.

I don’t even know exactly how many people actually prayed on a regular basis for this to happen.

Really, it took about a year for there to be a critical mass of visitors that exceeded what we normally had in worship. Then it was two years before I could look back and identify what had happened.

We just prayed for God to do what only God could do.

Should we have done other things to enhance the possibilities for growth?  Probably.

Was and is prayer that powerful?  Yes!

What do you make of this?

Moving to the deeper places,
Jeff