Last Sunday I preached on Acts 6 and I identified three major threats that can endanger the future of any church, especially an international church such as Thousand Hills. In Acts 6 there were “rumblings of discontent.” You wouldn’t expect this in a church where everyone is filled with the Holy Spirit. But the truth is that when a church grows, it will not always be pretty. So what are these three major threats?
1) Disunity
The early church was in some ways very much comparable to Thousand Hills. It was an international church and the two main cultural groups were Hebrew-speaking Jews and Greek-speaking Jews. In Thousand Hills the biggest cultural group are the Dutch, even though it’s an international church. Besides the Dutch we have many other cultural groups. As a total they probably make up 40% of the church, but each of those groups are relatively small in size.
We have to be careful that a church does not become divided along cultural lines. Why? There is a tendency for the largest groups to impose their culture on the church as a whole. While the international flavor is what attracted many Dutch people to our church, their tendency is – probably without even realizing it – to pressure the church to move in a direction that they have been comfortable with in the past. And all of a sudden, we could turn into a Dutch church with services in English and alienate all the internationals.
So we constantly need to guard the vision so that the church remains international, in the language that is being used, in the style of the services and in the organizational structure. We need to do everything we can to stay on the international course, which is the thing that makes us so unique.
In our case, in order to avoid disunity between all the different people groups, it is so important that we create a “third (church) culture” where everybody needs to give something away, but gets a great multicultural experience in return. This third culture needs to be attractive to people who are part of the local culture because we want to reach them, but it cannot be the local Dutch church culture.
Internationals are often so immersed into the Dutch culture that they would like to have a break from that on Sundays. Instead of focusing on fitting into the culture, they need to be able to focus on God and meet others who are going though a similar cultural experience.
That third culture can neither be the culture of one of the other cultural groups in the church. I remember that in the beginning phase HICC was often referred to as the American church. Why? Because so many of our full-time team members were Americans. And that is not a particularly good thing, because there are many people around the world who are not such a fan of American culture.
Even after I took over the role of lead pastor and most of the American team members had left, still many referred to the church as the American church while the Dutch, the South Africans and the Nigerians were all much bigger groups. I think that we have successfully changed the idea in the community that we are the American church and the fact that we have a multicultural pastoral leadership team (Dutch, Australian, American, Scottish and Greek) really helps to communicate this. It also helps us to attract people to Thousand Hills from all over the world. I think we are now more international than ever in the history of our church.
So would you be sensitive to people from other cultures and to people who do not speak your language? Be open to them and try to speak English as much as you can. That way we don’t alienate people who do not speak Dutch or any other language than English when we’re in a conversation. Help us build a church that is united in spite of all the differences! The Holy Spirit makes us one, no matter what culture we are from and which language we speak!
2) Disorganization
A second threat to any church is disorganization. In the story of Acts 6 the success of the gospel leads to an overload of work for the apostles in their administrative skills. They couldn’t cope any more with all the work, so the rumbling started.
We have quite a bit of organization at Thousand Hills. We’re not overly organized, but have as much as is needed for a growing church of about 300 people. I am so happy that we have people on our leadership team who are very structured and organized because if I would be the only person leading the church, I am sure there would be a lot of disorganization. I am a visionary and a connector. But I have learned that organization is not very high on my skills list.
There are two school of thought concerning church organization:
- Some believe the church should not have formal organization. It should not have buildings or paid staff. The house church model is the preferred model. The people who love this model believe that when the church gets organized it programs the Holy Spirit out.
- Others think the church should be like a well-oiled business. It needs all kinds of boards, committees, sub-committees, etc. If God wants to speak, he needs to get a place on the meeting agenda at least two weeks before the meeting…
Both extremes are wrong. God is highly organized, yet fluid. The size of the church determines the need for organization. The church in Acts was several thousands, so they needed quite a bit of organization. But they chose to organize it by relying on men full of the Holy Spirit. Let’s learn from them!
3) Distraction
The third threat was distraction. The apostles must have been tempted to solve the problem the wrong way. Their solution could have become worse than the problem they were trying to solve. I can almost hear the rumbling of the people against the apostles. They were probably thinking something along these lines: “If they wouldn’t spend so much time behind their desks praying and writing messages, they could do so much more for these poor widows.”
So they had to come up with a response: “So the Twelve called a meeting of all the believers. They said, ‘We apostles should spend our time teaching the word of God, not running a food program.’” (Acts 6:2 NLT)
Often when I tell people what kind of job I have, they always wonder if I do that full-time. It seems like a waste of good time to only preach and teach (I wish I had that luxury at this point… I still do lots of admin stuff). How hard is it to prepare for a message of 30 minutes on Sunday? I should… spend 3 days per week counseling people… teach three Bible studies each week… evangelize… do social work… take care of the accounting… make coffee… take care of the building. There are probably lots of things that people think I should do.
I think one of the main reasons for burnout among preachers is the fact that they are doing everything EXCEPT for the things God has called them to do. And the same is true for people who are not preachers. What is God’s unique calling on your life? Don’t be distracted too much by other things!
The apostles could have come up with a solution that was worse than the problem by changing their priorities to help solve the current crisis. The church would have suffered. False teaching would have abounded and the church would have stopped growing. It could have affected us even today! So instead they said that they “should spend [their] time teaching the word of God, not running a food program.”
So be careful the things that are threatening the effectiveness of your church. Learn from the stories of the early church in the book of Acts. Deal with disunity, disorganization and distractions. And learn from any conflict that may come your way. It’s your chance to grow if you deal well with it!
The above blog post is based on the message I preached last Sunday in Thousand Hills Hilversum, called “Growing Pains.” I hope you have a chance to check out the full message. This is the video:
Growing Pains (“It Starts With One” series) from Thousand Hills Int’l Church on Vimeo.