Room To Grow
So God’s message continued to spread. The number of believers greatly increased in Jerusalem, and many of the Jewish priests were converted, too. — Acts 6:7 (NLT)
My work looks quite different now than it did when I started. Tasks that once took an afternoon now take minutes. Some of that is technology, but much of it is simply knowing what to look for, the kind of understanding that comes from doing something long enough to stop being overwhelmed by it. Growth brought something else I did not expect early on: more responsibility, not less. The better you get at carrying something, the more you are asked to carry. And somewhere in there you start to realize growth is not only about what you can do. It is about what happens to the people around you because of it.
Lately I’ve been thinking about that on a bigger scale, not just in my own spiritual life, but in the church. I have been part of small congregations and large multicampus ones, and I have long believed that a healthy church is a growing church. Part of me used to push back on that. I have watched large churches lose their way until people felt like a number instead of a neighbor. But I’ve also been in places where growth felt like the opposite, where more people somehow meant deeper community, and wherever you were in your walk with God, you left a little closer to Him and a little more stretched than when you came in. The difference was never the size of the room. It was whether the growth reached the people in it.
That was on my mind this past week as I listened to a sermon at a church other than my own, though its story sounded a lot like my home church’s. The pastor taught from Acts 6, where the early church was growing faster than it could manage. As the number of believers multiplied, the Greek-speaking believers began to complain that their widows were being overlooked in the daily food distribution. It’s a strikingly modern problem. The apostles, the leaders Jesus had trained, did not wave it off, and they did not try to fix it all themselves. They gathered everyone and asked the community to choose seven people known for their character, their wisdom, and the Spirit at work in them, and they handed those seven the responsibility. Every one of the seven carries a Greek name, which suggests the very people who felt overlooked were trusted to help lead the answer. Luke’s summary of what followed is the verse above: the church did not just survive its growing pains., it grew through them.
The pastor then pointed to one of those seven. Stephen was chosen to help make sure meals reached widows, which was hardly a spotlight role. Yet it was in serving that his faith became impossible to ignore, and within a chapter he was speaking with such conviction that it cost him his life. What I had not noticed until that sermon was who was standing there. As Stephen was stoned, his accusers laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul (Acts 7:58), the man the world would later know as Paul. Scripture doesn’t tell us everything Saul carried away from that day, but the church’s fiercest opponent, and eventually its greatest missionary, first appears watching a man who had been faithful in a small assignment. Stephen never saw what his faithfulness would grow into. Most of us won’t either.
So, growth in Acts 6 moved in two directions at once. The apostles made room for others to lead, and the people given that room grew by serving. Our growth and the growth of the person beside us were never meant to be separate. That is not an argument for big churches or small ones. Both can be healthy, both can drift, and many are a little of each, and only you can honestly assess the place you call home. But it is worth asking whether we love our church because we are growing or simply because we’re comfortable. Comfort is not wrong. Yet if it comes from never being stretched, never serving, and never making room for anyone else, it may be telling us something. Sometimes that means asking whether we are in the right place. More often, I suspect, it means asking whether we are in the right posture in the place we already are.
Paul, the same Saul who once watched Stephen die, later wrote, “I don’t mean to say that I have already achieved these things or that I have already reached perfection. But I press on to possess that perfection for which Christ Jesus first possessed me” (Philippians 3:12). Even he didn’t consider himself finished. None of us are. The invitation of Acts 6 is not to go looking for a more impressive church. It is to notice where God is quietly stretching us, and to wonder who might be growing because we made a little room.
Where are you being stretched right now, and where have you settled into comfort instead? Who around you might grow if you made room for them, the way the apostles did?
A PRAYER
My prayer is we are thankful for the ways God has grown us, often before we noticed it happening. Keep us from mistaking comfort for health. Stretch us where we have settled and give us the humility to make room for others to lead, serve, and grow. Like Stephen, help us be faithful in the small assignments, and trust You with whatever they become. Amen.