I was reminded recently of a decision I made years ago that I think had more impact than I realized at the time. Reading an article about growing churches, I remembered a conscious decision I made in my twenties in my first church. I was working in a 5000+ member church where the high school youth group on Tuesday nights was 25 students. If you cannot immediately recognize that, it’s a seriously pathetic number. Something I read at the time led me to look differently at the group and consciously decide that if I expected growth, I needed to act like or plan like the size group I thought we ought to have. So, everything I did each week in terms of games, mixers, teaching, etc was tempered by thought “can this work with twice as many people”? If the answer was “no” then I changed my plans. We needed to do all the elements of youth group in a way that doubling our size would continue to work. The reality I faced was that if I did not grow the group fairly rapidly, I was going to be looking for a new job. On top of that was the reality that I felt called to be there. So, we planned everything in a way that doubling it would still work. As we encouraged students to bring friends and we did various strategic moves to grow the group, we did not find ourselves stuck by our structure. We were not limited in the number of students that felt comfortable in the group.
Currently, I work with many pastors of churches that are smaller than the high school ministry I led at my first church (that is after we grew the group to seeing 150+ per week) and wish I could somehow share with them the things I learned about limiting growth by what we do. Many of our youth ministers don’t think this large because they are in churches where a mega youth ministry would not fit. That is another subject entirely. If only people (youth ministers or pastors) could think very clearly about what their church would look like with twice as many people, what might God do?
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