Chapter 12

Principles to Grow By

Many churches are built around the personality of the pastor and as a result the work cannot be duplicated and the concepts are not transferable. Trying to imitate another person's personality is never successful. God has made us all unique individuals and His Spirit anoints us according to our own individual characteristics.

Many times a pastor who is anxious to see church growth makes the mistake of going to large, successful churches, looking at their programs, and watching the way the minister relates to his people. Then the pastor tries to copy the program and the personality. And it just doesn't work.

It is true that God does work through personalities. They play a very important part in the way we relate to people. But because Calvary Chapel has been built on principles rather than personalities, the principles are transferable and work in all varieties of personalities. Through following these simple steps Calvary Chapel pastors have found tremendously successful ministries. Let me share them with you.

When I first began in the ministry I served in a denomination whose main emphasis was evangelism. This was reflected by the fact that the first bit of information required on my monthly report was the number of people saved. The next box was for the number of people baptized. I had heard so often that the primary purpose of the Church was the evangelization of the world, thus every sermon that I preached was somehow brought around to evangelism and the appeal made for people to accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior.

My greatest frustration would come when I would prepare what I felt to be a powerful evangelistic sermon that would surely convert the most hardened sinner. And when I would arrive at church to my dismay there was not a single sinner in the whole congregation.

As I would sit on the platform looking over the congregation, I knew them all by first name, so I knew there wasn't a sinner in the house. During the song service I'd pray that God would somehow send sinners in and when my prayers were not answered I had to preach my evangelistic sermon to the saints. There was no hope of conversions. As a general rule I would add a few points in which I would castigate those in the congregation for their failures to be the kind of witnesses that the Lord wanted them to be. I told them if they were serving the Lord and were doing what God wanted them to do they would have brought some of their neighbors along to hear the Word of God and to be saved. I would begin to beat the sheep because they were not effectively reproducing or witnessing for Jesus Christ.

My heart aches when I think of those early days of my ministry, how I was creating guilt-ridden, frustrated believers. They were guilt-ridden because what I was saying was correct. They weren't being the kind of witnesses that they should be for Christ. Their lives weren't measuring up to biblical standards. They were frustrated because they desired to live victorious lives, but they just didn't know how because their pastor was emphasizing evangelism rather than feeding the Body of Christ. [Emphasis mine throughout.]

[I.] This was the first lesson. Traditionally I felt that the primary purpose of the Church was the evangelization of the world. But biblically, Paul in Ephesians 4 tells us that the primary purpose of the Church is to build up the Body of Christ to perfect the saints for the work of the ministry. The church exists to bring people into a maturity and a unity of the faith so that they would no longer be as babes but might fully develop in Christ Jesus. With my constant emphasis on the repentance from dead works and the doctrines of baptism, I had failed to bring the people into a fully matured relationship with the Lord and they stayed in a state of spiritual infancy.

[II.] My messages were topical, taken from Scriptures throughout the Bible. There was no consistent pattern in my preaching. One week my text might be from Matthew, the next week from Isaiah, the following week from Revelation, and the following from Genesis. I would share whatever topic happened to interest me that week or whatever Scripture might have just spoken to me. The most difficult part of the ministry at that time was finding a text from which to preach. I would find myself reading a book of the Bible until some Scripture sort of stood out in my mind and then I would develop from that text my message. I found that I had about two years of good topical sermons before I ran out of ideas and so my first few pastorates were two years' duration. After I had exhausted my two years' of texts, I would seek a transfer to another church. This continued until we lived in Huntington Beach. We were coming close to the end of our two years and it was time to move again, but a problem had developed. We had fallen in love with Huntington Beach! We enjoyed living there and our little girl had now started school. We did not want to leave.

Suddenly I was under pressure to find more texts and more sermons. About this time I was reading the book The Apostle John by Griffith Thomas. In one of the chapters he had outlined studies on 1 John. As I studied those outlines I found that they were excellent sermon material and there were approximately forty of them. I decided that if I taught through the book of 1 John on Sunday mornings, we could spend another year in this community that we had come to love. I bought several commentaries on 1 John and began an exhaustive study of the epistle. I expanded on the outline studies of Griffith Thomas and we spent a year on 1 John.

The interesting thing is that during this year our church experienced greater growth than we had ever seen before. We also had more conversions and more baptisms than we had ever experienced in the past. The people were suddenly filled with joy in their walk with Christ, they were experiencing greater power over sin, and they had a greater assurance of their salvation. Of course, these are the three reasons why John wrote the epistle and we are told that God's Word will not return void but will accomplish the purpose for which it was sent. Inasmuch as this epistle was sent to bring the believers into the fullness of joy, freedom from sin, and assurance of their salvation, God's Word did its work within their lives.

And so I learned the second lesson. Expositional teaching is stronger than topical teaching for feeding the flock. [i.e connective expository sermons!!!]

At the end of the year we still did not want to leave Huntington Beach. Having developed the style of teaching straight through a book, I decided to take the book of Romans next, which a seminary professor had told us would transform any church. I bought as many commentaries as I could find on the book of Romans, and spent two years teaching on it. During this time the church DOUBLED. The work of the Holy Spirit in the hearts of the people was electrifying as they and I personally discovered the grace of God and began to relate to God in a new way. It was about this time that I purchased a new Halley's Bible Handbook. (I was always giving mine away to new converts.)

On the flyleaf I saw a notation that said the most important page in the book was page 814. So I turned to that page to find out what Mr. Halley felt was the most important thing. There was the simple suggestion that every church have a congregational plan of Bible reading, and that the pastor's sermon be from the part of the Bible read the past week. I had never taken the people through the whole Bible. As a matter of fact I had never sat down to read the whole Bible straight through.

[III.] So I incorporated the third lesson. I decided that I would start the congregation reading the whole Bible...and my sermon would come out of the chapters that they had read. I have been following this practice now for many years and have seen people in the church, for the first time in their lives, read the Bible all the way through.

These two transitions--from topical messages to expository teaching, and to working straight through the Bible--have taught me some very fascinating things. Number one, I came to the realization that during the years of my topical ministry I did not have a true biblical emphasis in my preaching. Though I preached every sermon from the Scriptures, my preaching was not biblically balanced. The Scriptures tell of God's part and of man's part in salvation. The majority of the topical sermons that I preached were emphasizing man's responsibility. My sermons exhorted the people to pray, to witness, to commit their lives to serving the Lord.

But when you get into a book of the Bible and continue straight through, you find there is a greater emphasis on what God has done for man than what man should be doing for God. In a sense, through the topical sermons, I was emphasizing what we should be doing for God in order that God might respond to us. I was making man the initiator and God the respondent. For instance, if you give, God will give back to you, measured out, pressed down, running over. If you praise, you will be blessed with a sense of His presence, for He inhabits the praises of His people. If you will win souls, you will be wise and shine as the stars forever.

But now I learned that God is always the initiator so His part is always first. Take the book of Ephesians as an example. Paul spends the first three chapters of the epistle telling the church what God had done for them. He prefaces this section with these words: "Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places in Christ." And then his lists the glorious spiritual blessings and benefits that we have from God. It is not until he gets to chapter four that he deals with human responsibility buy exhorting the people to walk worthy of this calling wherewith they were called.

God was the initiator and now Paul exhorted man to respond to God. I found that when people began to discover who God is and all that God has done, they were eager to respond to God and did not have to be pushed or exhorted to pray or to serve. Now they were volunteering their services and their time. They could not do enough for the Lord as they came to the recognition of what He had done for them.

[IV]. The second thing I learned from these lessons was that evangelism is the natural by-product of a healthy church. When, in the early years of my ministry, I placed an emphasis constantly on the people going out and winning someone to Jesus Christ, the numbers that were coming to the Lord were very small. When I began to feed the Body of Christ with the Word of God, we had more conversions and baptisms in the first year than we had had in any previous year of our ministry. And as people continued to grow, the numbers the next year doubled, and it just continued to go that way because the people now were strong and spiritually healthy.

[V.] Then we happened on the third interesting change to come out of these experiences. Christmas and Easter Sundays were bedlam. There were always so many people coming to Sunday school and to church that the facilities couldn't hold them. Thus, those who would come only once or twice a year would come during the most trying circumstances, which didn't really encourage them to come back on a regular basis.

To deal with the problem of overcrowded rooms and the confusion in general, we decided that on Christmas and Easter we would not have Sunday school followed by church, but would have Sunday school for the children and Sunday morning service for the adults simultaneously. We had found in the past that many people would come to Sunday school and leave before the church and thus never hear the Gospel. So by bringing the adults together for teaching they had greater opportunity to receive the Gospel message.

Everyone loved it so much we continued the practice year-round. We also discovered that with the children being taught on their own grade levels and not being present in the sanctuary during the service heightened the attention level of the adults considerably. They were able to understand and absorb much more without the distractions of their children around them. As the morning service and Sunday school ran concurrently, I became, in a sense, the teacher of the adult class that happened to be held in the main sanctuary. [VI.] Later on we slipped naturally into the fourth lesson: double services. This worked out even better because then those who were teaching Sunday school could attend the next service, and it provided us with a lot more volunteers for the Sunday school program.

In going to double services we found that a smaller auditorium and smaller facilities were able to accommodate twice the number of people. So when we were in our building program we deliberately built the auditorium and facility with the intention of having double services. We found that there were those who loved coming earlier, there were those who loved coming later, and we were able to enlarge the total membership without enlarging the facilities or the staff. As an added benefit we now had two congregations supporting one facility. This meant that one of the congregations could support our local program and the surplus funds could be diverted into mission ventures. When we were later built to triple services, it was even more exciting, for we were able then to give two-thirds of our budget to missions while using only one-third of the total funds for our own local needs. This pattern continues to the present day.

[VII.] And, then, I learned a fifth lesson for building a strong church. We were experiencing such growth and so many new converts that we soon caught the attention of superiors. When a large church in our district had an opening, I was asked to take it. While in that church, a group became interested in the work of the Holy Spirit. They invited me to come and begin a Bible study in their homes, for they declared that they knew very little of the Bible apart from the readings in their prayer book. That Bible study soon grew so large that we had to break it into two.

The importance of having home Bible studies was invaluable lesson. In these home Bible studies I developed a whole new style of teaching. Rather than the Sunday oratory style, I would just sit and talk in a very natural way. They would feel the freedom to interrupt when they did not understand a particular passage or interpretation of the passage, and it would turn into animated discussions. I found that their attention span was increased. In church after thirty minutes of preaching people were restless. [amen to that one! In a Calvary service I hardly notice the time going by, even if it's an hour. But in my own fellowship, at times I find myself clock-watching, hoping for the end of the sermon, drawing submarines or B-17's in the margins of my notebook.] But we could sit for an hour-and-a-half to two hours in the home and then the people would actually be disappointed that I stopped.

Later on when we started Calvary Chapel, we started several home Bible studies. The one on Monday night was geared for the young people and I would more or less "rap" with them as we sat in the living room of a home in Costa Mesa. The group soon became so large that we no longer fit in the home. Kids were sitting in the dining room, kitchen, up the stairway, in the entry hall, and there would be more outside who couldn't get in. We were, at that time, building our first chapel. The slab had been poured, so at night we would set up lights and the kids would sit on the slab and I would sit there with them. We just built the chapel walls up around them as time went on. It was during this time that we began to reach hundreds of the young people who had been involved in the hippie culture. They loved the informality of sitting outside and having the teacher just sit there and talk with them rather than preach at them.

From these informal talks I developed the style of teaching in a natural, almost conversational way. I just talk with the congregation about the things of God, of the glories of His nature, of His Kingdom. I found that if I'm talking--rather than preaching--the attention span holds for an hour as they sit with open Bibles learning God's Word. A half-hour of preaching can wear people out, but an hour of teaching, if it's done in an easy conversational way, does not.

These are not complicated lessons. In fact, the secret that I seek to impart to those eager to enter the ministry is to teach the Word of God simply. Tradition can be a hard thing to overcome, but lack of church growth can be more discouraging. It's been exciting to watch Calvary Chapels all across the country grow as the power of God touches people's lives. The harvest of souls into the Kingdom of God is our goal. May God ever receive the glory and honor due His name.

[VIII.] Another important principle that pastors learn at Calvary Chapel is complete dependence on the Holy Spirit to help them in expounding the Word. Jesus said that the Holy Spirit would teach them all things and bring to their remembrance the things that they had been taught [John 14]. Paul said that the natural man could not understand the things of the Spirit neither could he know them for they were spiritually discerned [1 Cor. 2]. What is found at Calvary Chapel is the Spirit of God working through the Word of God to change the people of God.

There are many churches that offer excellent teaching of the Bible, but almost deny the current work of the Spirit of God. This creates dead orthodoxy. The people may be well versed in the Scriptures but it has not altered their lifestyles to any great extent. They have a form of godliness but have denied the power.

On the other side of the coin are churches that emphasize the Holy Spirit but neglect teaching from the Word. This leads to emotionalism and an unstable condition that is open to every wind of doctrine and cunning craftiness of men who are standing ready to deceive. Many heretical teachers have found fertile soil in church congregations that overemphasize only emotional experiences. It is so important to have a balance of the Word and the Spirit so that you can see the life-changing power of God at work and a stable growth of the Body of Christ.

At Calvary Chapel we have confidence that when God guides, God provides, so there is never an emphasis on money or giving. Many of our churches do not even pass the plate, but place a box at the entrance where the people who desire may contribute. God is never represented as being broke or facing imminent bankruptcy. The pastors have been taught that God is perfectly capable of supplying the needs for the things He desires to see accomplished. God does not need the support of His people to stay in business, the people need the support of God.

It is sad to see people driven away from the church by the appeals and gimmicks that have been used to solicit funds. Some have dropped out of church because they have nothing to give and felt embarrassed. We do not let this happen to them at Calvary Chapel because they are never asked to give or to pledge. As the apostle Paul said, never let your giving be by pressure or constraint, but let every man give as he has purposed in his own heart, for God loves a cheerful giver.

If you asked people who visited Calvary Chapel what impressed them the most, you would probably hear a variety of things, but some of the words that you would hear most often would be warm, loving, worshipful, casual. The first impression as you walk into the service is the warmth of God's love among His people. You see a lot of hugging, which probably goes back to the days of the hippies. There is a lot of happiness and laughter. There is also a reverent but casual atmosphere, which is reflected in the styles of clothes the people wear. They do not feel that they need to get dressed up to attend church. Yet if they are dressed up they do not feel uncomfortable. There is an acceptance of the person not the style of clothing. This again goes back to the hippie days when all kinds of clothes and styles were worn. Chuck Girard who was singing with the Love Song group in the earlier days of Calvary expressed it very well in his song "Little Country Church" with the lines:

"Long hair, short hair,

Some coats and ties,

People finally coming around,

Looking past the hair

Straight into the eyes."

The music at Calvary Chapel is fresh and alive, and filled with worship choruses. Many times a worship group will lead the singing accompanied by guitars, drums, and keyboards. Many of the choruses are composed by the leaders in the worship groups and are passed on to the other Calvary Chapels. This gives quite a contemporary feel. Often a young person will share a song and explain that the Lord just gave him the song that afternoon.

Most of the churches in the U.S. today are highly organized and highly structured. By this I mean they stress the dependence that the church has on the people and the dependence the people have on the church. At Calvary Chapel we prefer a looser structure, as we stress our total dependency on God. It is interesting that most of the people in the U.S. today fit more comfortably into an independent, casual category, thus we fish almost alone in a huge, well-stocked pond, while many other churches try to fish in a much smaller pond.

In the book of Acts we are told that when the Church was born the believers continued steadfastly in the apostles' doctrine, fellowship, breaking of bread, and prayers. These are the four features that marked the early Church and these are the features that mark Calvary Chapels. These are the things that are emphasized, sought after, and practiced, and we have discovered that--as in the early Church--the Lord adds to our numbers daily.

After seeing this work of the Lord with its remarkable fruit one is left with an obvious conclusion: "To God be the glory, great things He has done."

To quote a famous 1960’s tune, “The times, they are a changin”. After September 11, 2001 we have all become aware of the fact that the world has become a more dangerous place to live in, even within the borders of the United States. September 11th should be a wake-up call for all Christians and those who think they are Christians. If you were to die today-tonight-would you be assured of your place in God’s heavenly kingdom, a recipient of eternal life? The words of the apostle Paul ring out across the centuries asking this age-old question “Examine yourselves, whether ye be in the faith; prove your own selves. Know ye not your own selves, how that Jesus Christ is in you, except ye be reprobates.” Dr. Charles F. Stanley poses this same eternal question in his sermon “What Does It Mean To Believe In Jesus”. And he gives three essential criteria that will help you answer that question in your own personal life. The assurance of your eternity is worth confirming. CLICK HERE to find out if “Jesus Christ is in you.”