Monster Church Madness

Spiritual success has almost no correlation to the size of the church organization.
Put the First Church of Jerusalem in historical context. Two major items arise.
One, this takes place in the one setting where the nature of “church” is most optimal. Some of the characteristics are painfully obvious, but leading the way is persecution. Oppression was but a single feature of a failing government whose time had run out. They were tributary to another evil government whose time had not yet run out, so things were coming to a head and the church was just another tiny factor in this huge picture. Within the same generation of those just starting their families at the moment the first church was formed, they fled the city. They left behind most of their worldly property and went elsewhere, carrying the fire which was far more valuable than life itself. The one thing which made the fire burn brightest was the level of pressure which kept them honest. You couldn’t afford to be a Christian unless you were willing — nay, somewhat eager — to die for it.
Two, the early expansion was a response to pent-up demand for truth. It does not require a conscious grasp to sense things were utterly wrong, that the system was horribly broken and in desperate need of fixing. Jesus comes on the scene when a significant portion of the society knew instinctively a change was coming. While some of this we write off as common excitement, we know of a certainty some part of those people were on the verge of a genuine spiritual birth. It was this ineffable burning certainty which created the pent-up demand, which fed into the more secular fires of human discomfort.
There are other factors, but if you ignore these as you attempt to build a model in your minds of how God will work in your life, you will end up on the wrong path.
Crowds flocked to Jesus because some slender portion of that crowd had a valid reason, a very real drawing from God. They were the ones who benefited from His parables, because that living spirit inside of them received the meaning of those symbolic stories. Their conscious minds often did not, but their spirits got it, and some part of them knew this was the source of truth. So they stuck around, and their presence fired off the secular excitement of the masses. It was a circus atmosphere with miracles they certainly did not understand. The majority of those who got in on the circus did not stick with it; they were false followers looking for entertainment. They were the ones who lost interest when Jesus started talking about being the Bread of Life, warning them the party was over.
If you, church leaders, really caught onto what the Bread of Life business meant, you would realize Jesus intentionally drove the crowd away. There were multiple reasons for that, but one of those reasons had to do with shaking His body to separate the real from the fake. God does that in different ways, on different levels, periodically. As the Judean government began to take more seriously the threat of this unsanctioned rabbi, it was necessary to spare the fools and allow the real sheep to become more tightly bound together as they faced serious oppression. He came to bring a sword which cuts through the fat and breaks up human institutions, down to the very family household itself, and replaced it with a spiritual bond stronger than any DNA.
So while the First Church grew explosively despite the very messy execution of the Master, it’s because they truly believed the story about His resurrection. It called to them, as some part of their inner being could not walk away from it. And when Pentecost came, it solidly confirmed what had already begun. Something similar explains how the churches which spread from there exploded. There was a pent-up demand for truth and a chance to learn it and walk it. The demand was hardly a call for human comfort, or mere intellectual curiosity, but something worth tossing those aside.
As the gospel spread across the pagan world, the growth was a little less phenomenal. Further, there were huge problems with dragging these people away from their cultural customs into a proper Christlike lifestyle. Even worse was the vast layer of intellectual assumptions which kept twisting the truth into something else. By the time of John’s Revelation of Christ at the end of that first century, we see him lamenting how churches had drifted away from what had been so characteristic of the First Church. The Seven Churches symbolized the ways in which all the churches might have gotten off track to one degree or another, and only a few had not. All the failures were due to becoming too much like this world, and all their strengths came from suffering which fires a greater commitment.
When you build a monster church against petty and shallow political objections, all you really have is one more political institution. It has no correlation whatsoever with the explosive growth of that First Church in Jerusalem. You like to imagine it’s the power of God poured out, and you are emotionally stirred with excitement you imagine is the moving of the Spirit. That’s bogus. It’s not to say the Spirit of God isn’t moving, but you are working off indicators which bear no relation to the truth. On the contrary, given the facts of the First Church, chances are what you have is entirely human-based, and only by accident does it represent a genuine connection with God.
So you may well have a deeply spiritual body of active believers, but everything you point to as indicators of this is no proof at all. Make your boast when the government begins putting people in prison for refusing to worship the State, or confiscates all your tax-exempt property. When your congregation grows against that sort of pressure, you might have a basis for claiming God is at work in your church. Those days are coming, but they aren’t here yet. Meanwhile, the best indicator of genuine Spirit power at work in your congregation is not the size, nor enthusiasm, nor various human measures of success. It’s the radical change in people willing to forgo all those human measures of success because there is something else greater, too important to let those things get in the way. Tell me about your martyrs, the people who lost their jobs, homes, cars and such because the demands of the Spirit resulted in those changes.
Don’t boast to me of budgets, first class musical productions, massive buildings and media dominance. That sounds more like Laodicea. Tell me about people in jail for genuine Christian virtue. Don’t expect me to bow down to your superior management systems; tell me how people forsake the good life because they simply cannot help spending more time with each other. Tell me about people who ignore schedules set by this crazy world.
If you don’t yet understand how holiness conflicts with common conservative middle class American life, you really don’t know Jesus.