Multipying By Addition Or How Churches Grow

A healthy church will “multiply by addition!” A healthy church will grow just as a healthy body will grow. I’ve been told that when we are young our bodies produce more new cells than those that die and that as we get older that process is reversed, that is, more cells die than new cells we produce. This is true of a healthy church. A church that is not producing more healthy cells than dying cells is a dying church. The result is inevitable but not irreversible. Church can be healthy and growing again.

REMEMBER THE MISSION

ILL - In 1629, when the favorite wife of Indian ruler Shah Jahan died, he ordered that a magnificent tomb be built as a memorial to her. The shah placed his wife's casket in the middle of a parcel of land, and construction of the temple literally began around it. But several years into the venture, the Shah's grief for his wife gave way to a passion for the project.

One day while he was surveying the sight, he reportedly stumbled over a wooden box, and he had some workers throw it out. It was months before he realized that his wife's casket had been destroyed. The original purpose for the memorial became lost in the details of construction. They built the Taj Mahal, but they forgot the reason for the building. They forgot what their mission truly was!

(Dr. James Dobson, Coming Home, Timeless Wisdom for Families, (Tyndale House Publishers, Wheaton; 1998), p. 122)

Dr. Harry Reeder, the pastor of the 4,000 member Briarwood Presbyterian Church in Birmingham and author of “From Ember to a Flame” writes that one of the best Scriptures for the revitalization of the church is Revelation 2:5. Three things are commanded by the risen Lord of the church in this passage:

1. Recall

2. Repent

3. Recover

How many of you know that this church had 2-4 hundred in church regularly with high days of 5-6 hundred? That there was a time when this church, our church was one of the largest churches in Dothan? When 607 buses were running and bringing children to our church. How many of you can remember a day when folks were being added to the church daily? When attendance was growing and lives were being changed radically? When First Free Will Baptist Church of Dothan, Alabama was one of the most effective soul-winning churches in our entire area?

How many of you believe that that can happen again and would do anything, make any sacrifice, pay any price to see it happen again? Remember the formula for revitalization? It can happen again because God has not moved and He has not changed. He still loves souls as much as He ever did. We are the ones who have moved and changed.