Beyond Meeting Needs
Paul Johnson
I have never seen strong values come out of a committee. Values, to be held passionately, require a point person.
—Paul Johnson I was not yet out of college, only twenty years old and starting a new church. My wife, Darla, and I were newlyweds playing house and, in a way, playing church. Darla would cook up someone's new recipe, and I'd experiment with someone's recipe for church growth. My recipes usually called for ingredients from marketing: I'd identify people's needs, build programs to meet those needs, and then administrate those programs. The programs worked, people's needs were met, and the new church grew. Since we didn't have any children and were in a rural community, my wife and I could make regular visits to every attending family. People loved the personalized attention they received. It wasn't long, though, before I realized my methods were restrictive. My passion for meeting people's needs was building a congregation with ever-increasing needs. The church grew because people came to have their needs met. But when I could no longer meet their needs, they could leave just as quickly as they came. I came to see that few in the church had actually adopted my vision—they just appreciated having their needs met. I began to realize that need-meeting, as a method of church growth, works only to a point. Woodridge Church, for example, my latest church plant, is in a metropolitan setting. If I introduce programs that meet people's needs and attract visitors, many of the visitors will tell me, "There are fifteen churches within a fifteen-minute driving distance that have better programs than you do." I can't compete with that. After five years of on-the-job training in my first church, I began preparations to start a new ...
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