Some churches are strong by almost any measure. The preaching is faithful to Scripture. The people care for one another. There are good groups, good classes and leaders who pray for the congregation by name. Many people in a church like that grow in ways everyone can see.
And yet, in the same church, some believers who have been there for years seem much as they were when they arrived. They come, they listen, they serve, and the deeper change everyone hoped for has not come. Pastors in strong churches feel this keenly, because it is hard to know what more the church could have given. Often the honest answer is that a strong church gives a great deal, and growth also needs something no church can supply on anyone’s behalf: each believer’s own response to God.
What a Strong Church Gives
A strong church gives its people what Scripture says growth draws on. God’s Word is taught clearly. Worship turns hearts toward Him. Other believers offer encouragement, correction and prayer. There are places to ask questions and opportunities to serve. God uses all of it, and none of it is wasted.
Those gifts are real, and a church is right to keep giving them faithfully. But they are offered to people. They reach their purpose as each person receives them and responds.
Each Believer’s Own Response
Paul held both of these together when he wrote to the churches in Galatia:
“Share each other’s burdens, and in this way obey the law of Christ… Pay careful attention to your own work, for then you will get the satisfaction of a job well done, and you won’t need to compare yourself to anyone else. For we are each responsible for our own conduct.”
Galatians 6:2, 4–5, NLT
In the same short passage, Paul tells believers to carry one another’s burdens and to pay attention to their own work. The church is meant to bear weight together. Yet each person still answers for his or her own life before God. Community and personal responsibility belong together.
For growth, that means a church can teach, encourage, pray and walk alongside someone, and should. But it cannot respond to God for them. The truth reaches each person’s life as that person takes it in and answers it: in what they choose, how they treat people and what they do with what God shows them. God is the one who transforms, and He calls each believer to take part.
What This Means for a Church
This takes a weight off pastors that was never theirs to carry. No church, however strong, can produce growth in anyone. God gives it as each believer responds to Him, and not all of His work can be seen from the outside.
It also points to where a strong church can give more. Many believers are willing to respond but unsure how to do it in the particular situations of their own lives. Teaching tells them what is true. They may also need help taking that truth personally: asking what it means for their marriage, their work or a habit they have carried for years, and keeping at it over time. A church can help each person learn how to make that response.
The Next Question
Why can someone hear so much good teaching, and even believe it, while their life stays much the same? Why Information Alone Doesn’t Produce Spiritual Growth takes up that question, including why learning can feel like growing even when life has not yet changed.
Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New Living Translation, copyright © 1996, 2004, 2015 by Tyndale House Foundation. Used by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Carol Stream, Illinois 60188. All rights reserved.
