Acts 13:32-52

Jealousy

“Jealousy, thy name is Pastor’s Convention.”

I didn’t know my grandfather. He died a few months before I was born. He was a pastor. I knew my dad quite well. He lived to be 92 and for the last 20 years we lived in the same small and attended the same church. He was a pastor. I’ve been a pastor for 29 myself. I know pastors pretty well.

It is a truly weird experience to be in a room full of pastors when the question comes up, “How many does your church run?” Most of the answers are “evangelastically” speaking. You can knock anywhere from 10% to 30% off the answers and get a pretty close estimate. You also hear a lot of, “They had a lot of trouble with the last pastor,” (ten years ago), and “Of course attendance is down in the summer (winter, spring, or fall). We usually have about a hundred more” (on Easter). We all really know that God is not nearly as interested in how many we bring to church as He is in how many are brought to glory, but it is just too easy to fall into the numbers trap.

What happens if you really do start running thousands? All of the other pastors rejoice, right? Actually, that is not exactly how it works. Too often, when one pastor breaks out from the pack numbers wise the first thought that goes through “the pack’s” mind is, “He’s not really preaching the gospel.” “If I had the money to bring in big acts a lot of people would come to my church, too.” “There must be something wrong with what they are doing for them to have more people than me.” Or, just as bad, “I need to start doing what they are doing.” This thinking has a long history that goes all the way back to Acts 13. (It goes even further back if you count the Pharisees jealousy of Jesus’ popularity.)

That is how it works in the world but this is how it works in the kingdom. Together we are the body of Christ and individually we each have a role to play. We should rejoice when someone plays that role well. My dad never pastored more than about 120 people. He was great at taking a group of 10 or 12 with virtually no resources and building them up to 100 to 120 with a decent place of worship. Because of the work he did there are two churches in the Nashville area that presently run 500-800 and neither of them would be here if he had not laid the foundation.

Therefore, let us be faithful to our own calling. Let us help those who struggle and rejoice with those who thrive. It is God’s kingdom, not our church, we are called to build.