Does God Want a Crowd?

    Jesus said that where two or three are gathered together in his name, he would be in the midst of them. He also told his followers to go out into the highways and hedges and compel people to come in. In Acts we read Luke proclaim with rejoicing that 3,000 were saved and added to the church on her first day, and then 5,000 more were added a few weeks later. Over a dozen times in the first fifteen chapters of the book, we read Luke rejoicing over the many numbers of people who were added to the faith and added to the church.
    But we also read that early Christians gathered in homes to pray and worship––probably groups closer to a dozen. Story after story of individual lives being transformed because of one-on-one or small group conversations, are recorded for our benefit.
    So which does God prefer? The small group or the crowd?
    The answer is both. He wants both.
    It’s hard to deny that God is into large crowds. Even in the Old Testament we read of great crowds gathering to worship Yahweh as a very good thing. The prophet Daniel told his countrymen that in the end times, God’s people would gather in innumerable multitudes. Revelation 5 speaks of our gathering for worship as being “myriads upon myriads, ten thousand times ten thousand.” I don’t even know what a myriad is, but I’ll bet its a lot of people. It seems to me that God wants crowds gathering to worship Him. He sent His Son to die for the whole world (a pretty big number) and He did that to have a big family. That’s why Jesus told us to go into the highways and hedges to bring even strangers in. That’s why He gave his marching orders to go into all the world to make disciples. He wants a big family! Do we want what God wants?
    So what about where the Bible talks about small numbers of people gathering in His name? Well, He wants that too. Spiritual growth takes place best in the context of a small group of people who love each other, challenge each other, and walk through life encouraging each other. You can’t do that in a crowd (not even in a small congregation of a hundred or so); that takes a small group. The church in Jerusalem was both big and small. They gathered for worship in the Temple as a very large group, a crowd, and they gathered in homes through the week for fellowship, prayer and encouragement. I believe churches work best and accomplish most when they are both big and small.
    So yes, at The Bridge, our desire is to grow and attract and reach the greatest number of people possible. We aren’t exactly going into the highways and hedges and compelling them to come in, but we are working on it. We want what God wants, and God has made it clear, He wants his church to grow! That, in a nutshell, is our Radical Objective. It is our intentional drive to reach as many people this next year as possible, to bring in a crowd of people to worship our great God, and then to meet together in Life Groups to grow spiritually with a few others.
    God wants a crowd worshiping Him. So let’s go bring them in!