When Few Become Many

by Sarah Leteta

My mother-in-law grows a fabulous garden, full of the best veggies and most delicious strawberries and raspberries. One year she cut her gorgeous raspberry bushes back to almost nothing — just a few pathetic-looking sticks left. I had heard of pruning, but this was extreme. I couldn’t figure out why she would cut them so drastically.I assumed that next year’s berries would be pretty dismal.

I assumed wrong. The following summer those sticks had grown and spread and blossomed and, yes, were loaded with deep, red, juicy raspberries. Wow! I thought. This is amazing! I picked buckets of berries and thanked God for knowing His business when He created these things. I never should have doubted my mother-in-law.

I’ve been thinking more about those bushes, how they were cut back to nearly nothing and still thrived, and about our church. It has grown recently — not just a few new people, but lots of them. This is both exciting and shocking. We were so small for so long: tiny, itsy-bitsy, miniscule. You get the picture.

More shocking is that we didn’t do much to get these new people. No new programs, no new facilities, no new committees (not enough of us to have more than one committee anyway), no outreach, no nothing. I wished we had done something to spawn this growth, something bold and spectacular, so we could congratulate ourselves — a nice pat on each other’s backs. Instead we just scratch our heads. How did this happen?

This question had been asked before, back when our church was experiencing the pain of people walking out the door rather than in. Why did people leave? Why does anyone leave any church, short of moving? Because they just don’t like it. And by “it,” I mean the building, the people, the politics, the doctrines, the food, the bathrooms, the carpet, and so on. It’s an old story that most church people know all too well. Those who are left spend a lot of time wondering what happened and why, and whether the Holy Spirit might have walked right out the door with everyone else. Discouragement settles in, and it’s hard to shake.

Can Christ take a few fish and a few loaves of bread and feed a multitude? Can He renew a fragile, tiny church? Can He help members of a congregation who could barely help themselves, a church that had no plan at all? He can, He did, He does.

Here’s my theory: Just like those pruned raspberry bushes, we too were pruned, painfully cut back to meager. What was left still held something good, it seems. We were small but spirited, disappointed but not bitter, sad but hopeful. And we continued to pray.

In the last two years, a fresh spirit of communion has visited us. We’ve all realized that we love each other — even when we drive each other nuts. We eat and talk and laugh and share together. Sabbath fellowship has begun to stretch; we’re no longer in a hurry to leave. We are becoming authentically “church.” When new people walk in, they are greeted by people genuinely happy to see them.

Much can be said about church growth: its excitement, its adjustments, its pains. Suffice it for now to say that we are happy and amazed, and that the end of it lies in God’s gracious hands. May He bless all our churches, large or small.

Sarah Leteta attends the Parkland CoG7 near Edmonton, Alberta.

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