16/07/2021
📚 *The Insight* 🪔
_with Apostle Moses C Black_
```Fri 16 June 2021```
*SPEAKING THE TRUTH IN LOVE*
*Ephesians 4[15] Instead, we will speak the truth in love, growing in every way more and more like Christ, who is the head of his body, the church.*
Frequently when we talk about church growth, we rush to think of numbers specifically. There is nothing wrong with numbers but that is not the biblical determinant of church growth. First, we need to establish what is a church, a church is “the people of God who follow Jesus into the world”. This therefore implies that church growth happens when the people of God grow into maturity and Christlikeness. A church grows when the people in the church are becoming more and more like Jesus Christ, not when their is only increase in numbers. Numbers, a big budget and a big church building cannot be how church growth is defined and understood. A church can have 100 congregants and lose 30 member but have the remaining congregants maturing in Christ, despite it losing members, that church is growing either way. On the other hand we can have a church with 200 congregants and have more 50 congregants added but has zero maturity level, that church is not growing. What we need to understand is many churches today are using worldly means to draw people into the church and i once said, if you use carnal means to draw people into the church, you will have to use carnal means to keep them in the church. However, you cannot satisfy a spiritually thirsty soul with carnality.
Church growth happens by *SPEAKING THE TRUTH IN LOVE.* Speaking the truth refers to preaching and teaching the Word of God. Maturity in Christ only comes from solid biblical teachings. Church growth happens when the individual Christians who make up the church grow into spiritual maturity by learning the Bible, and learning to obey the Bible. Also another major indicator of church growth is when the church have it's members discover their spiritual gifts and put
