There is a lot of insecurity in church world.
As a pastor, I can tell you that the insecurity comes from within and is built into the very system of ministry.
I sometimes think I have spent half my ministry life at conferences. I have attended a lot of conferences. I have spoken at a lot of conferences.
When pastors gather at conferences, and get a chance to talk in between sessions, the conversation almost always goes like this:
“How big is your church now?”
“How many people are attending?”
“What are you guys running these days?”
In other words – how many people are you gathering?
We are taught to measure our success by our size. We are taught to measure our progress by our growth. We are taught to measure our importance by our numbers.
No wonder we don’t want to send people out! We want to keep them so we can feel good about ourselves. We want to keep them so we can impress others. We want to keep them because we are insecure without them.
Sending comes from a place of security.
Notice what Jesus does when he sends out the seventy-two:
The Lord now chose seventy-two other disciples and sent them ahead in pairs to all the towns and places He planned to visit. These were His instructions to them: “The harvest is great, but the workers are few. So pray to the Lord who is in charge of the harvest; ask Him to send more workers into His fields.” Luke 10:1-2
While Jesus is sending out the disciples, He instructs them to pray for even more to be sent. He is way serious about sending.
Very few pastors ever get to the place of security where they will purposely send people out of their churches in order to plant new churches and reach new people. Only 7% of American churches have reproduced another church – and half of that 7% who do reproduce are actually church splits! In other words, less than 4% of current American churches have deliberately sent out people from their church to plant a new church. Why? Because they are more committed to gathering than they are to sending. And because they are too insecure to send.
Years ago I was pastoring a church in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Our staff and elders felt led to begin exploring the idea of starting a new church in a nearby neighborhood in order to reach more people that were far from God. Since our church had never planted a new church, we turned to the largest church in town and asked for advice from their pastor. I will never forget his words. “We don’t need any more new churches in Broward county. Our church has it covered.”
There were 1.5 million people in Broward County at that time. Surveys showed 95% of them were unchurched. And this pastor said “We don’t need any more churches. Our church of 2,000 has the county covered.”
That is being too insecure to send people out.
That is being so arrogant that you think it is all about you and your church.
That is what happens when we have only a gathering mindset.
We ignored the advice this insecure pastor gave us and our church of three hundred planted its first church. We planted twenty-three more churches over the next thirteen years. And our church grew to more than three thousand in the process.