Should You Know Everyone At Church?

    “Pastor, I miss the old days when we knew everyone at church. I’m glad for the people getting saved, but we’re getting too big. Last week I met some people at a school function and found out they go to our church. I didn’t even know them!”
    That was part of just one conversation I’ve had over the years with concerned church members over the changing atmosphere of the church as it grows. I’ve had many over the years in two different churches.
    I usually respond with an initial question, “Do you think it is really that important to God that you know everyone in your church?” Can we find that value anywhere in Scripture? If God wanted us to know everyone at church, why would he have made the first one, the model, so big? (The church in Jerusalem was several thousand in number.)
    I then often ask, “Isn’t it more important that everyone in our area know Jesus, than that we know everyone in our church?” After all, that’s what the ultimate mission of the church is, The Great Commission, introducing as many to Jesus as we can. If we are really doing that, we can’t remain so small that we will know everyone.
    I fear that by insisting that the church remain small enough for everyone to know each other, we are desiring something for the church that God never intended. We are trying to make the church what we want rather than what He wants. That’s not good.
    That’s not to say that small churches do not matter to God. They most certainly do, and there were plenty of them in the New Testament. I spent my formative Christian years in small churches and for my first ten years as a pastor, my church would have been considered a small church. But if any church is true to its calling, is faithfully offering hope and forgiveness to its community, reaching out and caring for people, and if it is surrounded by any kind of population, it cannot help but grow. That’s the nature of the Gospel. Healthy churches that are faithfully proclaiming God’s Good News in populated areas grow. They just do. And if they do, they don’t stay small.
    I think it's fine for us to reminisce about the past and remember the “good old days” when there were fewer of us. But we have to stop and remember that there were challenges in those times that we do not have today and the good old days were not always good. Remembering fondly the smaller crowd is almost like being ungrateful for the many who have been saved since. How can we rejoice in seeing lots of people saved but still long for fewer people? Remember, the struggles we faced back then were all met with a goal in mind, that of reaching the lost and bringing them into God’s family. So let’s not wish ourselves back. Let’s be grateful for what God has done, is doing, and let’s keep striving to be the church HE wants us to be.
    “And the Lord was adding to their number every day those who were being saved” (Acts 2:47 NET).