Grow
1 Corinthians 3:1-9
Click here for the video sermon, "Grow."
As some of you know, I serve as a Trustee for my theological alma mater, Austin Seminary. It’s an honor to do so, and as an added benefit I get to travel back to one of my favorite cities a few times a year. The format for our time as a board follows a familiar pattern that opens with worship, followed by lunch afterward. Over the years those lunches have given me the chance to get to know my fellow Trustees, some of whom are colleagues in pastoral ministry and some of whom are not. At the lunch this past November, I sat at a table with one a man from Arkansas who brings his considerable financial experience to our work as a board. He asked me a familiar question, “how big is your church?”
Now, I have to confess that this question is one that I get fairly often. It is invariably the very first follow-up when people discover that I am a pastor. And really, that makes sense. It is standard social convention to ask people we don’t know what they do for a living. If I’m honest, I don’t always come right out and tell people I’m a pastor for fear they’ll bring a truckload of unhelpful assumptions to our conversation. Sometimes I just say that I work for a nonprofit. We used to be called Teaching Elders, so I guess I could say that I’m a teacher- but that’s a whole other set of assumptions. The question about church size is equally tricky for me. The first congregation that I served was in a community of around eight thousand people and had about 200 members on the roll. I felt a little defensive answering the question back then because I loved my people. While fewer in number, they were mighty in spirit. Then I realized that while the question often expected an answer in the form of how many members were on the roll, or how many worshippers filled the pews on an average Sunday, I was under no obligation to answer in that way. So, when my fellow trustee asked how big our church was, I jokingly countered by asking what he wanted to know- square footage? The unhelpful assumptions that come with questions about church size are that somehow bigger must be better. That more is preferable to less. Those are the metrics we’ve been taught by the world around us to value. But are they the best way to measure faith, and faithfulness?
As Paul continues to respond to the church in Corinth, he suggests that they are more flesh than spirit; words that we probably need to unpack a little to get at what he means. When Paul uses these words it’s unlikely that he means them in the way that we’ve come to hear them. Paul isn’t invoking a Platonic dualism between the body and the spirit, or soul; the kind of dualism that would eventually give rise to the Gnostic heresy that suggests that the material world is bad or corrupt and that only the spiritual realm is pure and good. From the very opening of Genesis, we are given to understand that this world is of God’s making, and that every last bit of it is made good. The problem isn’t with matter, the stuff by which we are made. Neither the human body, nor anything else of God’s making is inherently bad, or evil. No, the problem comes with what we value and how we order our lives according to those values. What we hold on to, and the things we let go. When Paul refers to them as people of the flesh rather than spiritual people, what he is effectively saying is that they tend to order themselves according to the immature values of human limitation.
The rise of the information age has made child-rearing even more of mine field than it already was. You can take to the internet and find any number of articles telling you the best way to raise a child, and all the things that you’re likely doing wrong. One of the hot-button topics is how and what to feed a baby, and when to introduce new foods into their diet. As if all those questions weren’t stressful enough, parents are supposed to be able to do this while operating on dangerously low levels of sleep due to the frequent waking of their child. If you’ll pardon the pun, it’s a recipe for disaster. How long should a baby nurse, what about solid food? You’re supposed to start with cereals, then slowly introduce fruits and vegetables, but only one, or two at a time. That’s because you are growing a human, it’s important work. No, that’s not right, is it? We don’t grow humans, we just feed them in the hope and expectation that they grow. And these newly developing bodies cannot take in everything at once.
This is the argument that Paul makes to the people in Corinth. They are growing as a community of faith, into the body of Christ, but it takes time. It takes deliberate intention about what is needed to grow. That kind of growth isn’t about bigger, faster, more. Such thinking leads to all sorts of complications that can be tremendously unhealthy. That way of thinking of things, those values may be consistent with the spirit of the age, our human inclinations, but they are not consistent with the Spirit of God who gives us life.
By any measure, the wrestler and actor Andre the Giant was a large man. You don’t get a name like that without being big. In fact, he had a medical condition known as gigantism caused by an excess of human growth hormone. This in turn led to Acromegaly which may have contributed to his pre-mature death. The point is that there are all kinds of growth that are far from healthy. As the writer Edward Abbey once put it, “growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” Like many families we have made marks on a wall in three different homes. They are the progressive measures of our children’s growth. But the oldest is almost 21 now, so we don’t make her stand up against the wall anymore. She’s likely reached her maximum height. But that doesn’t mean that she doesn’t still have some growing to do, it just won’t be vertically.
This is, ultimately, the problem that I have with the question about church size. Are the member roll, operating budget, or even worship attendance the only way we understand growth as a community of faith? It’s fairly common to hear people in churches aspire to growing their membership. To what end? Gigantism, acromegaly, premature death? That isn’t to say we don’t have a story that’s worth telling and sharing with people beyond ourselves. But, to return to Edward Abbey, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” What if we have reached our maximum height? Or even shrunk a bit? Would that mean that we are done growing? Or could it be that this fixation on those kinds of numbers have more to do with being people of the flesh than attuned to the Spirit of God.
For the Corinthian church, the spirit of the age was something we might recognize in our own. Orators were the celebrities of their time. There was no mass media. Even books were rare, as literacy was even rarer. Ideas were spread by those who could speak them, and speak them well. The better an orator was the larger their following. People became identified with who they listened to, who they felt spoke for them. That celebrity culture had begun to infiltrate the church in the way they regarded those who had come to share with them the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection. The affinities that people had for Paul, or Apollos, or someone else has given rise to quarrels and jealousies, and some pretty ugly behavior. Sound familiar? It turns out that they still have some growing up to do, the kind that isn’t necessarily accomplished by adding to their numbers.
The truth that Paul’s words point to is that as people of the flesh we often substitute the measures and habits of the world, and our strategies for satisfying them, for the Spirit of God that alone gives us the kind of growth that truly matters. The biggest of churches can be infantile in its relationship to God, and the smallest often grow in the kind of faithfulness that only comes when a lack of material resources forces people to rely more heavily on what God is up to in their midst. We can get so distracted by who belongs to what camp, or how big or small the numbers are that we forget the one who is ultimately the source of our lives. When we give our loyalty to lesser people and things, we cannot expect to grow in the ways that truly give us life. It isn’t our job to build a tower to the heavens. That’s been tried, and it was a cautionary tale about the limits of human effort. The church isn’t ours to grow. Rather, we are God’s to grow, in God’s own way as God sees fit. We are God’s to grow in mercy. We are God’s to grow in faithfulness. And ultimately, we are God’s to grow in the self-giving love of Jesus Christ.