Scaling Up is Just as Important as Scaling Down

One of the critiques of seeker churches, is that while they do a great job of accepting newcomers, providing a safe space for investigation, and initiating them in into the Christian faith, they don’t always do so well at helping new Christians continue to mature as followers of Jesus.  (There are plenty of churches that wouldn’t consider themselves to be seeker churches that struggle with this as well.)

The problem with seeker churches, as I see it, is that they do a great job of scaling down, but some struggle to scale up. Once the seeker gets in decent spiritual shape, there is the potential for stagnation and even atrophy, because the programming is still geared to those who have walked into church for the first time. This is still better problem to have than to be a church that functions more like a health club where people keep showing up but don’t get in better shape.

Many existing Christians who visit seeker churches fail to stick because of the lack of depth in the teaching. They aren’t attracted by a scaled down version of the gospel. They want to go full speed with the heaviest weight possible.

What has happened in many cities is that different churches excel in reaching people at different levels of spiritual maturity.  Some churches specialize in reaching out to the unchurched who know almost nothing about the Bible and have never really taken the gospel seriously. Some churches do a better job connecting with Christians who have been following Jesus for a long and need to be challenged to keep growing beyond their current level of spiritual maturity.

While it’s better for the these different kind of churches to exist than for the options to be limited to churches in which outsiders aren’t welcomed and insiders aren’t growing, something is lost when churches (or CrossFit gyms) specialize in training only one kind of person. So, to return to the scene in an earlier post, how can churches facilitate an environment in which three people can be doing the Christian faith side by side, even though they all have different levels of experience and are at varying levels of spiritual fitness?

Newbies need experienced mentors. Veterans need newbies around to inspire them and remind them of the initial power they experienced when they started their journey.

Few church experiences are more boring than when you get a group of experienced Christians together to study the Bible. They know all the answers to the easy questions. They’ve learned how sidestep the hard ones. Throw one new Christian into a group of veterans and watch the sparks fly. The newbie is still amazed by grace. She doesn’t know there some questions you shouldn’t ask and some sins you shouldn’t confess.

All it takes is hanging out with one new Christian to remind a veteran Christian whose spiritual growth has plateaued why they started following Jesus in the first place.