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THEORY OF CHURCH GROWTH (03) ✝️✝️✝️ (¿µ¹®)
PAUL  2019-11-06 04:12:59, Á¶È¸ : 2,183

THEORY OF CHURCH GROWTH (03) ✝️✝️✝️ (¿µ¹®)

INTRODUCTION

(18) When such factors come into the church, serious problems may occur. The Korean immigration church has many cases of such problems. For Example:

1) Elim Christian Reformed Church, in which the writer has been serving, is one of these churches which has experienced problems. Once the church had a very difficult time. It was planted in the city of Westminster, California, where so many Vietnamese live that it is called Vietnamese Town.

2) In 1988, the writer's church had fifteen members who had previously been unchurched though they were Christians. Some of these were deacons and deaconesses. The church grew rapidly in the beginning in spite of a poor location for a Korean ministry. There were no commercial centers or offices available for the Korean people in this predominantly Vietnamese city.

3) Nevertheless, the Elim Christian Reformed Church was a growing church. The reason for this was the relationship of the church members to the outsiders; the church members formed a connection with outsiders and brought them into the church.

4) Their main problem was the interrelationship among the church members and also between the pastor and the church members. Of course, they had a good mutual relationship in the early stages of church planting, but it was not long before this changed. Gradually the situation became more serious and the congregation began to quarrel as the Corinthians had (I Cor. 11:1).

5) This conflict continued for ten months, and then the church was divided into two parties. The reason for the church members' division, according to the writer, was that they not only lacked the grace and love of God in the vertical sense, but also due to the lack of pastoral leadership. There was a problem with church management. There was no discipleship training for the congregation.
6) In the early stages of the church, the pastor (writer) had twenty members of the diaconate, including twelve deaconesses, in the church. The Council of the church, the Steering Committee, consisted of this group because the church had no elders.

7) At that time, several deacons with strong personalities made trouble within the church. One of them let the church fall into trouble on three separate occasions during a nine-month period. At first, he would have meetings with his fellow deacons unofficially outside of church. He claimed that it was his right to lead the church as the supervisor as he claimed in a previous retreat meeting on the mountain.

8) The congregation became troubled by his rashness, and they confronted him with concern. Yet he never saw the error in his behavior but instead gathered the people and tried to persuade them in order to control them. He continued in this way and eventually formed a group to serve his purposes.

9) The second time, he demanded that his pastor have a meeting with several deacons in order to discuss how to solve the problem they had debated previously. The pastor agreed to have the meeting for the purpose of keeping peace within the church and made the utmost effort to negotiate with and understand the deacon on behalf of the church leadership. However, the deacon did not intend to accept the views of the leadership. This resulted in quarreling between the two groups, namely the pastor's group and the deacon's group.

10) In the third instance the problem concerned a financial issue. The church could get financial support (GGC: Grants for Growing Churches) for the senior pastor of the church from the denomination. The pastor sent three persons of the Steering Committee including the deacon with whom he had problems to the Home Mission office of the denomination to gather information.

11) After visiting the office, the unhappy deacon opposed giving the senior pastor the GGC stating that the pastor would use it for his own purposes, but the GGC was intended only for the senior pastor's living expenses according to the plan of the denomination. So the pastor proposed to reduce his salary received from the church instead of receiving the GGC as a part of his living expenses from the denomination, and this was not accepted by the deacon.

12) The deacon did firmly stick to his opinion that the church should not pay the GGC to the pastor. However, use of the GGC could not be changed for the purpose of other things, because the church had to report how the GGC was spent to their denomination, and it should be paid only to the pastor for his living in compliance with the supporting plan of the denomination for the growing church.

13) At last, the deacon began to incite anger among the deacons by telling exaggerated lies as to how the pastor spent the money. There were those who believed the deacon and this eventually resulted in the small group (and the deacon) leaving the church. Since that time, the church has become peaceful.

14) Of course, the pastor had told the deacon of his fault privately, but he would not listen. Thus, the pastor brought the deacon before one or two others. Finally he brought the matter before the congregation. Still the deacon would not acknowledge his fault, so the Steering Committee compelled him go along with those who supported him. The pastor did, of course, observe the problem carefully for nine months in order to determine the type of character this deacon displayed. He definitely was found to be ungovernable and inadequate for the ministry.

15) In this case the writer as the pastor found two reasons for the church's difficulty in its early stages. One was the person who, without training, formed his group against the congregation and the pastor. In other words, the writer as pastor had failed in his ministry because he did not train the laity for ministry.

(19) It can be said that church growth depends to a large on the officer training of the church. Rev. Taek Jin Lim said that the Church cannot grow healthily without the training of its officers (Lim 1984, 20). If the pastor does not make disciples for the ministry, he will face two problems.

1) First, there may be a rise in complications such as conflicts between the pastor and the leading members of the congregation.

2) In fact, it occurred to the writer several years ago that he had encountered conflicts between pastor and laity due to troublesome people in the Elim Christian Reformed Church.

3) G. Douglass Lewis said that whoever has conflicts is human. He said, \"to be human means you will have conflict, you will experience it within yourself, between yourself and others, and between yourself and organizations\" (Douglass 1984, 12).

4) The conflicts may be a cause of a unified strife where the church becomes sick and divides into two separate groups.

5) Second, the church cannot grow when it is sick, just as man, animals, or trees cannot grow when they are sick.

6) In other words, the Church cannot grow due to its sickness because it is an organic living body.

(20) Why does conflict arise in the Church? It seems that the conflict, which may be the obstacle to church growth, is due to lack of discipleship.

(21) If that is true, disciple-making should not only resolve conflicts, but it should also enable the church to grow through mobilization of the lay people. ⛪️⛪️⛪️

- To be continued -


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