5 Keys to Church Growth

This podcast is a repost, orginally published on April 21, 2018.

Pastor Priji & Pastor Jojo discuss some essential elements in building and growing your church. Feel free to share your thoughts on the same with us through an email or any social media.

Here our desire is to equip our church planter and church leader to fulfill their God given mission. Today we have Pastor Priji on the church talk.

Pastor Priji: Our goal has been to brainstorm ideas that can really help church leaders especially new upcoming churches. They are the primary target for these podcasts.

Pastor Jojo: When we think of church growth one of the important aspect of it is to have a vision. So what are the important points that one has to remember when looking for a vision or how do they plan for it?

Pastor Priji: I think, if you want your church to grow then you have to add the goal of growth in your vision. If it’s not part of your vision and mission statement, then your church is not going to grow. It may organically grow over a period of time, but it will not intentionally grow. For example one of our dream and desire is to plant a house church in every pincode of the city, these are the part of our vision statement. Vision is something that you can really drive into the heart of your people week after week and month after month. It’s something God has to put into your spirit. That becomes the DNA of your church.

Pastor Jojo:Absolutely! Like you just mentioned, it has to be from God and not your vision. Lot of times people end up making their vision and mission statements and not what God wants.

Pastor Priji: It also helps that you receive this vision statement from God. Especially when it’s about growth. Because sometimes God may or may not want to give you a church of thousands of people. So our dream should not have a mismatch with what God has in store for us as a vision. So that’s why it’s so important to receive your vision from the Lord. Ask God “what is it that You want me to do, what kind of growth are you expecting me to exemplify through my church.”

Pastor Jojo: So for any young leader who is actually looking to plant a church or who is just thinking about it prayer has to be the foundation for anything in that case.

Pastor Priji: Also because like you rightly said when you pray you receive the vision, but it is not just the reception of the vision but it’s also the the growth of the vision – the strategies you receive, everything in a time in a place of prayer.

There are so many churches I’ve seen that start with a great movement of prayer and then the vision is birthed and once the vision is birthed they stop praying. And that is where we begin to fail. We have to learn how to go back into a place of prayer irrespective of how we feel, because prayer is the one thing that will give the church the fuel for growth and the capacity to hold the growth.

Pastor Jojo: How do you plan or strategize to reach out to a community who look forward to come to the church?

Pastor Priji: The primary reason for growth in our church from our personal experience has been by building relationships.
One sister who just got baptized last Sunday, she was reached out to by a sister who lives in the same PG. One night she hears somebody crying on the rooftop on the terrace. She goes to the terrace to find this another sister crying and she ministers to her, shares the gospel with her, she comes to church and gets saved and gets baptized. It’s as simple as that, building relationships becomes the foundation for the growth in the church. This is how the disciples of Jesus grew from 1 to 500 by the time of Jesus’s ascension.

Pastor Jojo: Let’s deep dive into the concept of outreach. What are the ways or strategy that they have to follow in terms of reaching out to more people? What do you think is a key to all this in terms of an outreach if we have to define outreach. How would you go about it?

Pastor Priji: I would define outreach the way Jesus did. Jesus called the 70 and send them out two by two and gave them an instruction – do this, go here, behave like this and return with this – very clear precise instructions they received from Jesus.

So often we base our strategies on what everybody else is doing or on the most popular trends. Now that’s not wrong. I’m not saying that it is wrong for you to use your context and be relevant and try to use them to reach out to people. That is very much necessary – Jesus did that, the first century church did that, Apostle Paul in his teachings, he did that but the primary source of strategies has to be something that we receive from God.

For example one of the things that I receive when we were praying about our church growth is that God said He would call our church to spread the word of God and to distribute Bibles. And since then we’ve given away hundreds or thousands of bibles. And it’s not about numbers anytime. Apostle Paul said it like this, “I sowed somebody else watered but it is God who made it grow”. It’s so important for us to follow that as a church that we become intentional at sowing and leave the results to God. When it comes to outreach don’t do it only to increase your church numbers, do it to genuinely love people.

Pastor Jojo: What are the basic aspects that you would look as a pastor that you would empower your leadership team to actually focus on in terms of strategizing and creating your plans?

Pastor Priji: I think that we should not impose our perspective on everybody else. There are people in our church who do different things. They are not part of the official church program per se, for example there are a couple of guys who go busking. They just go out and stand at junctions and they start singing songs. And when people gather they share the gospel. Sometimes they give them Bibles. Every time I see their stories on my Instagram feed, I text them and say that I’m praying for you right now. Go ahead and go in faith and may God give you the breakthrough and I intentionally pray for them. It’s very necessary that as leaders you believe in what your people are doing you. It’s one thing to say that “I’m the pastor and I will stand with you”, but another thing is for you to look for and say how can I stand with them and pray and help them not just emotionally or by prayer but even financially and many in other ways.

Pastor Jojo: Seeing that we are towards the end of it. The points that we discussed were – vision, prayer, the reach of community, how we can do outreach and empowerment within the church itself. I hope all our listeners would have had a great time listening to us and they would be blessed.

If you are blessed, please do write to us and let us know:

• what point spoke the most to you
• If there’s anything that you want to add to it.
• what are the things that hinders your ministry that has been a challenge in your church.