Quality vs. quantity

Everyone will agree that quality is important, and quantity without quality is not acceptable. Yet there is a fleshly desire in us to look at success in terms of quantity. When it comes to evangelism, see how the focus is on how many people have been 'saved' rather than if the salvation experience is genuine and deep for all of them. See what damage is done when the evangelist wants to impress people with numbers, and then he waters down the message so that more people can walk in! This leads to churches growing up with many people who imagine they have been born again when they have only repeated some words or felt some excitement, without seeing their sin in the sight of God, repenting and receiving salvation from Jesus. Some others have been prematurely born, with their experience short of being born again. Such people are many times the cause of a lot of problems within the church.

Look at some people planting churches. When the number of churches becomes the driving factor, quality gets neglected, and some of those churches become nothing more than clubs or entertainment centres.

For some of you this may sound repetitive. But I believe many have not thought much about salvation from God's point of view. They think of escaping hell and going to heaven, or getting blessings from God or solutions for their practical problems. But from the time Eve disobeyed God and ate the forbidden fruit, God's problem with man has been sin. By choosing the tree of knowledge, what Eve essentially chose was a life of independence from God and living according to her own understanding. All the problems in this world can be traced to us people wanting our own way, rather than submitting to God.

To restore us to God, He had to deal with two problems. One was the distance created by our sins between Him and us (Is.59:1,2). The second was the sinful nature we had inherited from Adam and Eve because of which we were sinning (Js.1:14,15). Forgiving us our sins without helping us to come out of the power of sin would not really be salvation. When Jesus paid for the sins of the whole world through His death, forgiveness became possible for everyone (Jn.3:16). When we honestly acknowledge our sins and express our desire to stop sinning, the Holy Spirit enters our heart and gives us a new life. This new life gives us a hatred for sin and a desire to be pleasing to God. Now He continues to work in us so that little by little we learn to overcome temptations and follow Jesus (Php.2:12,13). This causes us to increasingly become like Jesus in our life (2Pe.1:3,4).

The goal of the evangelist is to lead people away from their sins to salvation through Jesus Christ. And then when these people join the church, the church's responsibility becomes to help them grow into the maturity of Christ (Co.1:28).

Paul laboured both with evangelism and church planting, but he never lost sight of the goal of every member growing up to become like Jesus in His character.