Country Star Says Growth Shouldn’t Be a Church’s Main Goal

Published: October 25, 2024

Country Star Says Growth Shouldn’t Be a Church’s Main Goal

Movieguide® Contributor

Former country singer Granger Smith recently created a little controversy when he made a video saying that growth shouldn’t be a church’s main priority.

“A lot of times a lot of people I talk to, I ask them, ‘What’s your goal here?’ and they say to grow,” the “Happens Like That” singer said in the video, “and is that is not the goal of a church. It’s not what the Bible says. Grow. Go therefore and grow churches. Grow, grow, grow one church and make it really big and make multiple campuses.”

“All the messages on video that got a lot of hate…” Smith shared. “I had to hide a few because of like language and just direct assaults on me.”

Former country artist Granger Smith is sharing advice about churches and tithing with a podcast listener whose home was destroyed in a tornado last May.

READ MORE: WHEN SHOULD YOU TITHE? COUNTRY-STAR-TURNED-PASTOR EXPLAINS

Smith acknowledges that growth can be a good sign of a church’s development, but it shouldn’t be the main priority.

“Let’s think about it together. There are parentheses. There are many subsidiary goals. Growth is definitely welcomed as a byproduct but not a slam dunk indicator of faithfulness.”

“Bad churches can grow with good marketing and only a few people were like, ‘Oh I see what you mean by this.’ Most people were like, ‘You’re wrong. You’re wrong no matter how you look at it. Growth is the goal.’”

Only a few people tracked Granger’s point.

“One person said, ‘The main goal of a church is to glorify God,’ and I was like, ‘Amen.’ See, the idea that I want people to think about is if your main goal is to glorify God, then one of your main purposes to do that is to be faithful in it. To be faithful and a good byproduct is that God will grow the church through faithfulness and that will glorify him.”

Karl Vaters, who wrote De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What’s Next, would agree with Granger and his video commenter.

He asks, “If we pay less attention to attendance, what should we pay more attention to? My answer to that is ‘almost everything.’ Almost everything else happening in a worship service is more important than how many people are in the room.”

“When we don’t pause to remember what really matters, it’s too easy for the lure of attendance numbers (both up and down) to become more important than they deserve to be,” he says.

D.C.-based church elder and author Jonathon Leeman also agrees that many churches get carried away with attendance numbers and expansion.

He says, “We can love our vision of what a church should be more than we love the people who compose it…To love your church means, in part, to want it to grow toward everything that God defines as good. It’s to want your church to grow in a biblical direction” and not only a numerical direction.