Surfing the Wave of the Spirit

Joy and I were having a conversation the other day about churches and how they grow. This is a bad time for growing a church. For at least the past ten years, church attendance has been falling at a rate of about one percent per year. It is a time of great opposition and disinterest in religion, especially in Christianity. That, coupled with the recession has hurt all churches, especially ours.


What makes a church grow spiritually? I know those things which keep it healthy--love, the preaching of the Word, sound teaching, etc. These make a church more likely to grow. But there are plenty of loving churches where the Gospel is preached and growth is slow or nonexistent.

There are nonspiritual reasons for growth, too. Churches on main roads generally grow faster than churches on back roads. When a church reflects the needs and desires of a particular portion of the contemporary culture, it will grow, too. (There is really no one monolithic "culture" in our world, just wide collections of many cultures, leaving room for almost every kind of church to find a niche.) But this can happen whether or not God is in it, I'm afraid. Growth or lack of it is no sign of godliness.

There are other factors which are also cited for the growth of churches--relevance, purity, concern for the lost, faithfulness, and many others. All of these may have an impact on the growth of the church but none of them in themselves means that the church will grow.

Look at the Christian landscape today. How many churches are growing--I mean really growing? How many are reaching the lost in any large numbers? What we see are many congregations, offering many different techniques and styles, mostly without significant success.

Now think about the churches that are still growing today. They can be high or low church, contemporary or traditional--they can be very, very different both in practice and theology. But there is one thing they all have in common--a sense that the Holy Spirit is there.

The degree to which a church is likely to grow depends upon the expectation of the people that the Holy Spirit will move in their midst. There have to be signs and wonders, not necessarily in the Charismatic sense, but certainly in the spiritual sense. People have to see that something supernatural is going on.

People are drawn to Christ by the moving of the Holy Spirit, not by preaching or praying alone. We must ask of God, and we must see an answer. In growing churches, there is a full expectation that God will make Himself known. They come to church expectantly, not knowing what He will do next, but convinced that He will do something.

People often use sports illustrations to explain the church. Let me suggest a new one --surfing. Churches grow when they catch the wave of the Holy Spirit.

The church is not built on our own effort. It is not a race, where the strong and the fit succeed. It is not a game requiring strength and ingenuity. Church growth is an enterprise powered by the overwhelming power of God. Its force is irresistable, unstoppable, and inevitable. Our task, if we are serious about growing churches, is to look for that power and ride it. It involves less planning and less study of the world, and more planning and more study of God's intentions and actions today. We need to catch the waves. We cannot create them.

The first wave started at Pentecost. On that one day, three thousand people were added to the church. The disciples rode that wave for some time Another wave came when the church was under persecution, through the underground movement of evangelism. All through the history of the church - the Prostestant revolution, the missionary movements, the great awakenings, the holiness, pentecostal, and Charismatic movement, the Wesleyan revivals, the Moody revivals, the crusades of Billy Sunday and Billy Graham, the preaching of Jonathan Edwards, and so forth, we see the Spirit moving in waves and eddies. None of these movements last forever, any more than waves on the sea last forever. Every movement of the Spirit in the church inevitably is brought down by pride, jealousy, and heresy. The waves may crash; the tide remains. God continues to move in the church, using different people and different names. Even so, the church goes on.

As far as we are concerned today we have two choices, we can catch the wave, or miss it. We can ride the Spirit, or be knocked down by it.

If we are to grow in this generation, we must not look to restore the waves that have gone on. Nor should we try to create a wave, molded to what we think it should be. We should look, neither to the present, past, or future, but to God. We should seek Him out, to try and discern where He is working His signs and wonders today. I don't mean finding the next trend or fad, but we should genuinely seek what the move of God is. We are like surfers in the water, looking for the next big swell. When we find it, then we ride it, allowing the power of the wave to carry us forward.

What will the next wave be and when will it come? I have no idea. It is not for us to know really. But we can seek God with all our hearts, and stand eagerly before Him. If we seek to be moved by God, God will move us, and the next wave of the Spirit will come here as well.