I knew the right answer to that question. I was supposed to say, “Oh, yes, Lord! You must increase and I must decrease!” It may have been the right answer, but it was not the real answer. I wanted to see my church succeed, my kingdom enlarged, my name magnified. In that moment I realized that somewhere along the way, “thy kingdom come” had become all jumbled up with “my kingdom come.”

I went back to our church and told them I had been leading them wrongly. “Our goal,” I said, “is no longer to build a great big church. It is to reach our city, and to take the gospel to places in the nation where Jesus is not known. If God grows our church in the process, so be it. But if he takes from us some of our best resources and people and sends them out to start new works, that’s ok, too.”

It was during that season that we tapped into a completely new stream of spiritual power. All of Jesus’ promises about the greatness of the church, you see, are tied to sending out, not gathering in.

Read the article “How I Dumped the Bigger-is-Always-Better Church Model and Found Something Bigger” on foxnews.com.