There are really two types of church growth. One type is spiritual growth while the other type is growth in numbers. You would expect most christian churches to need both types of growth but the truth is they often focus on only one.
Normally the focus is on the growth of numbers in the church. This is cause churches place a big amount of their time thinking of new ways to gain visitors and to get those visitors to change to members. This is not a bad thing. The truth is churches must have an increase in numbers over time to keep the doors open.
The fact that more people means more money is not a bad thing either. It takes cash to keep the building up and the air conditioning running. That in itself is why a lot of christian churches are so focused on getting new members. The problem is that often this is the merely reason they require new members.
I have heard it said once in a church that they needed to go knock on the doors of the neighborhood next door since they had plenty of rich people there. This shocked me to no end and I hope it shocks you too. This church was consumed with the idea of money and that was their just reason to need growth.
Needless to say this church needed to do some growing in another way beforehand they should have looked at numbers. What I am chatting about is spiritual church growth. This is the other type of growth that churches now and again focus on.
Normally you see the smaller christian churches focus on this. They also stay small cause this is all they focus on. Spiritual growth means the church is looking to disciple their members. I am a large fan of this. Every church must move from making members to making disciples.
This is a long approach but it causes the members to be more like Christ every day. This is what the church is meant to do. Again however there is a difficulty. If the church turns its attention away from evangelization and turns it to focus simply on those members of the church it is going to die out over time.
Churches like this often forget the need for a building and air conditioning is vital and can benefit the furthering of the gospel. A decent mix of both types of church growth is needed. If you hope to have a thriving church then you will need to find some way to combine these two.
A good quality way of doing this is by holding small groups that are less formal and causes people to open up about things in their own lives. This can be a great way to get spiritual growth started. By spending time outside of the normal Sunday service doing this type of teaching you could disciple the members easier.
This will also leave room to have Sundays for more evangelistic meetings and messages. Cause Sundays are when visitors normally show up you can focus on the numbers. Remember it is vital to move these visitors from their status to members and then members to disciples.