 Good afternoon, Pastor David. How you doing, John? Welcome, everybody, to Unfiltered. You know, Pastor, recently through emails and social media, I've been getting these messages on how to and it's how to build your worship team, how to have an effective kids ministry, how to, and I wrote some down, how to grow a church in attendance, how to be a dynamic and motivational speaker. So you're getting all these how-tos to grow a church. As a matter of fact, you know, looking through some books, Sticky Church, I mean, there's these books that are out that are really influencing. What's that other one called? This one's called The Church of Irresistible Influence. Yeah, okay, there's a lot of stuff out there. So there's a lot of stuff out there that is giving like manuals and gimmicks on how to. Do these elements make a good church? You know, I don't think that when you're, when your goal is numeric, when you're thinking that a large church is a good church, I think you're moving in the wrong direction because large isn't always good. It's not always equally good. I can tell you this, when our fellowship first began and that would be almost 42 years ago when our church first began, I having a couple of years of assistant pastor experience, but having never, never planted a church or done anything like that and not having accessed anybody who had, I can tell you, John, that when we first began our fellowship that I didn't know what to do. And so I bought seven small books, seven of them. I remember that for some reason. And, you know, they were how to, how to manuals, you know? You need to have, you know, an authority in the pulpit. You need to have a very expressive worship team. You need to have vitality in the children's ministry, things like that. And, excuse me, more than one of these, more than one of the books were focusing on the things that I was supposed to do to enable the growth of the church. And so I, at that time, had a friend who was also a professor at Biola, the university that I had attended. And he'd become close to me and I was very close to him. And so he had been given the post there, and this is like in 81. He had been given the post of church growth. They actually had a class that was on church growth. And so I had called him and said, I'd like to come and have lunch with you, because I loved him, not for any other reason other than to see my professor whom I had grown to love and my wife Marie had grown to love, his name was Dr. Moore. And so we went, I went to see him. We went to the cafeteria and got some lunch and all and sat down and he says, OK, David, tell me, why is your church growing? Now, our church at that time was certainly not a huge church by any means. We'd been going for, I'd say, two, three months, maybe five months. I don't remember anymore. But it hadn't been going that long. We'd grown to around 200 and all. And in the measurements that they have in church growth, they actually, at that time, again, this is over 40 years ago, they said, if you reach this 200, then you want to reach 500, then you want to, and they had steps. And so to reach the number 200 as rapidly as we had was impressive to my professor. So he said, how's it going? I said, well, we've got a little over 200 people. Dave, tell me how that happened. And I was ready to recite the seven steps to church growth that I had memorized. He said, but wait a minute, I have to go get something. I'll be right back. And John, as God is my witness, I'll never forget this. When he walked away, I sensed the spirit of the Lord speak to my heart. And I heard within my heart the words, if you take the credit, I will take my hand off your ministry. I heard that. If you take the credit, I will take my hand off your ministry. I could hear it as plain as if somebody was speaking to me. And when he came and sat down and said, OK, David, tell me, how did your church begin to grow so quickly? I said, it's all Jesus Christ. It's all the work of the spirit. I have no clue. God, the way God does church, he does it on his own. It's to him be all the glory professors, Dr. Moore. I'll never forget that. And I never have forgotten that. So when I get these ads or somebody wants to give me a book and you can see it on social media quite often, how to grow a successful church, how to have a successful youth ministry, how to have a successful pulpit. It always seems to put the stress on my efforts and my abilities and things of that nature. And I was just recently speaking to our fellowship concerning the ministry Jesus gave just this last week we were speaking about this where he breathed on them and said, receive the Holy Spirit. And in essence, he was saying, and I'm sending you out. And I was sharing with the church for a moment that if the Lord doesn't send you out, you don't have any authority. If he doesn't breathe on you, his powerful Holy Spirit, you've got no power. And if you don't take his gospel, you have no message. And I believe that what has happened in church life at this time is people are relying on the gimmicks of those whom they consider to be successful. So they find something that is appealing to people. It doesn't matter what it really is. It may be that they emphasize worship. There was a movement that was very much emphasizing worship and you would go for a 45 minute church service of worship in a 15 minute sermon and people would come and eventually that movement died. You have others that are signs and wonders oriented, come and see God heal, stretch legs and this and that. And those kinds of things don't last because they're not built on the word. They're not built on the work of the spirit within the life to transform. It's not built on that. It's built on the personality of the pastor who's the celebrity who is the person who everybody comes in actually hero worships because they think that surely this person is anointed by God because he's attracting so many people. And I learned a long time ago that that's not necessarily true. In the book of Ezekiel, God is speaking to Ezekiel and he says, and I'm paraphrasing obviously out of chapter 33 but he says to him, he says, son of man, he says, the people are speaking about you along the way. He said they stand there near the walls and they say, come in here, the man of God, the things that he has to say. He says, so they come and they listen to you. He says, and they sit before you as if they're my people. He says, but they are not my people because they hear but they do not obey. And I do believe that the church today is filled with people who hear whatever it is they want to hear. But even if it's convicting, they don't obey. They get upset. They're trying to even now many, many try to cancel the pastor. They try to cancel me during the message. And the time when you're thinking, we went through the season of COVID when people were not able to come and when we were opening up again and we opened up fairly early when that happened, the people who were there stayed. They didn't want to get up and walk out. They didn't vote with their feet. They didn't say, oh, I'm offended because these were people who wanted to be there, John, as you remember. But now that the churches are opened up again, we now get delicatessen Christians once again who's saying, oh, you know, that's not what I wanted. I wanted this, you know, as if it's some kind of buffet or some kind of place that you go, just select what it is that you want. And when they don't hear it, they won't, you know, they just walk out and refuse. And so I think that because people see, because people will spend time seeing these are things that are taking place. They say, well, this is how you build a church. Don't say this offensive thing here. Have this kind of music here. Dress in this kind of way here. Make sure that you have your swoopy hairdo. You know, make sure that you have the lighting. Make sure you have a theater feeling in your church. And so we replace the Holy Spirit and we replace the word of God with things that don't change lives, John. And so, yeah, there are books. So over the years, you know, I've been in ministry for a while and I've seen a lot of it, you know. And what is it that God taught us? And, you know, one man sows and another man waters, but it's always God who brings the increase. And if you pour the word of God out to people and love them and pray for them and rightly divide the word of truth, the hungry will come to eat. And those who are there for something else will find something else because there really is a smorgasbord out there. There really is, there are so many churches and it's so easy to hop from one to the other, you know, because what they are consumers are not really committed. And finally, I think that these books appeal to pastors who very often are at their wits and they want to see people show up and they say to themselves, I must be lacking. These people know what church is like. So I wouldn't condemn anybody for reading the books. I've read them myself. I didn't do so with a specific intent to build a church. I wanted to learn. But I think that every one of us as pastors need to learn that it's not the numbers. It's not that numbers don't count. They do. I mean, if you're out working and you're doing it for a while and nobody shows up, it may be that you're not called to that place or it may be that you're just not a called person. You need to know that yourself. But if you're sowing the seed of the word and praying and you're not making God's word boring, you know, because one of the worst things you can do is take the living word of God and making it boring. But if you have a love for Christ and a passion for him and you try to teach and you ask for God to give to you an anointed worship team so that people can actually worship God together in a beautiful way and just trust the Lord to bring the increase and don't value yourself based on how many show up. I think that at the end, you'll hear well done. Pastor, there's a, and we'll wrap up with this. My timer's gone off. When if you, you've said it before, you strive to maintain or maintain this. Chuck Todd has said it, if you strive to attain, you strive to maintain. There's always a gimmick. And that week, that next week, the gimmick's done. So if it's not with the word or the spirit, what really is there? And so, okay, Pastor, well thank you so much. I wanted to talk about that because I'm getting a lot of how-to's. Yeah, me too. The how-to's and me-to's. And for the church to not to be caught up in these gimmicks, it's the spirit that leads. Just love Jesus and love his word. And walk in his spirit and you'll be okay. Amen. Well, Pastor, thank you so much for sharing with us today. Want to invite our church family to come join us on Wednesday evening, tomorrow evening, as we're going through Romans. And it's been a fruitful study. It's been rich. I'm enjoying it. It's been fun. And we're getting, we're having some fun, not fun time, we're having great time in worship. And fellowship and spending time in God's word. And then to remind you that we have our Sunday morning service at 8.30 and 10.45. Invite you guys to come out and join us. Then we have our men's conference coming up. I'm excited about that. You're sharing with us. Hall of Fame Anthony Munoz is gonna be joining us. And Ken Graves, Pastor of Bangor, Calvary Chapel of Bangor, Maine. You can purchase your tickets online or you can actually stop by the gazebo. And we're taking an interest sign up sheet for Israel. So if you guys are interested in signing up, you can stop by the gazebo after services, sign an interest list. I mean, I'm looking forward. Well, earlier you said, what do you mean, week? Well, we'll see. May 7th through the 18th, 2024. We're trying to keep the cost between $43 and $4,500 in total for everything. Hopefully people will come with us. And it's gonna be an amazing trip. So we have just about a year. And so, well, Pastor, again, thank you for joining us. Friends, thank you for joining us. And we look forward to seeing you. God bless you.