Good growth is slow growth. Are those couple of moments when God has done that to me bad? No, they were wonderful touches of grace. The problem comes if I start to think that’s normal and everyone needs a crisis moment that leads to huge character change. Ideally growth is slow. We should seek growth that’s slow. Most sanctification should happen through the slow plodding walk of hearing the Word preached, taking the Supper, worshipping the Lord, and rubbing shoulders with the people of God.

There’s an increasingly common quip in response that suggests that healthy things grow, and then stop growing. The only thing that keeps on growing constantly is cancer.

The first is usually used to suggest either that your church not growing is a sign of it not being healthy; or used to defend either a growing church or a focus on numerical growth within your church.

To put my cards on the table: your church that isn’t growing could be healthy or unhealthy. On its own growth isn’t an indicator either way. Growing is not a bad thing, it’s often a good thing, but it isn’t always. A focus on numerical growth—by which I mean making that a goal rather than dealing with growth as it comes as a result of other things—is typically a bad thing.

Post-Covid many British churches shrunk or closed. Many other ballooned. With the recent Nigerian diaspora, many churches have ballooned again. There were other challenges in both moments of growth, but my point is simply this: ballooning isn’t desirable.

Of course, if it happens then you react to it as best you can, scrambling to teach doctrine and culture, carefully considering how and where to reconfigure structures, as well as all the other things you usually do to help new people join. You celebrate the new people, they themselves are precious gifts. But the fact of sudden growth is difficult for leaders. It’s inevitable that scrambling to keep up will be less ideal than if you’d grown to that size slowly over a number of years.

Why’s that? Because slow growth is good growth. Most of the time, good growth is slow growth.

I don’t want to suggest that all fast growth is cancerous, but I do want to suggest that it provokes a crisis of leadership. Churches are like trees and growing them is the slow work of pruning and watering and watching over multiple generations. A Church’s Pastors and other governing authorities are supposed to slowly grow with the church. You hope that some of this growth is numerical, though that can be as much a factor of place as anything else, but we can be talking about growth in depth and discipleship too.

We slowly mature as God gives us the grace to suffer. We can grow very suddenly through particularly difficult periods, and sudden growth in a church is this for leaders: a period of intense difficulty. It might be joyous difficulty but it’s stretching because naturally we mature slowly through a long series of small knocks. The danger with the sudden stretch is that a big blow to the head always runs the risk of killing you.

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