Spiritual Growth through Service

A long time friend and I occasionally have the discussion about success measurements, especially in organizations. as a society, we are so numbers based. The bar chart looks better if the bars go up. The revenue pie chart looks better if there’s no dominating piece of that pie.  It’s been said that some churches measure their success by the 3 B’s, Buildings, Baptisms, and Budgets.

One measurement we never could come up with is spiritual growth. How do you measure the spiritual growth of an individual. If I measured mine, the charts would be all over the table. There are times that I have less spiritual growth than others.

Here’s some food for thought with the measurement to back it up. A student minister and now friend who has brought his group to ReConstruct for the past four years gathered some attendance data on his student group. Below are his findings on the percentage of students that participated in a ReConstruct Project and who are still active in their church.

Since                        %

2004                        68%

2005                        58%

2006                        76%

2007                        91%

Please keep in mind that this also includes those who have since gone off to college. What does this say?  Serving matters in our spiritual growth.  It’s just as much a part of our Christian life as discipleship and worship. I would never suggest us putting a percentage on our spiritual growth. I would, however, use this measurement given by my friend to prove that the majority of those involved in service stay plugged into the local church and work on the other parts of our lives that help us grow spiritually.