Listening to God and growing together
God loves you unconditionally, no strings attached – that's the good news.
Church growth is about churches putting down deep roots into this unconditional love while growing outward in love for their communities - so that they might experience this love too. It’s about being fully alive in Jesus Christ and all he wants the church to be.
The Methodist Church is committed to being a growing, inclusive, evangelistic, justice-seeking church of gospel people. We are called to speak of, listen for, and live out the goodness of God – so that new people become disciples of Jesus Christ and committed Methodists experience a deepening of faith. These missional commitments to growth, inclusion, evangelism and justice are equally important and cannot be separated. They flow from the Our Calling vision of the Methodist Church and are lived out through the twelve practices of A Methodist Way of Life.
Our beautiful and broken world, of which we are a part, is as much in need of hearing about that divine love, seeing it lived and shared, and being healed and transformed by it, as ever before. As we live out the practices of A Methodist Way of Life together, we can invite unaffiliated people to journey with us, participating in these practices and encountering God’s love in Christ as they do so.
Being a growing church means growing spiritually, missionally and numerically. Growth isn’t about seeing more people worshipping in a building on a Sunday morning – it's much bigger than that.
A ‘growth plan’ is simply a plan of action saying what your church, circuit or new Christian community will do in the next 12 months to grow spiritually, missionally and, by God’s grace, to grow numerically too. Growth planning is simply a tool to help us grow. New growth planning resources are coming in May 2025.