As I mentioned before, love is what makes a Christian community grow. Community is like a garden, and gardens contain many growing, beautiful things. But community is also the garden in which grumbles grow. Since the fall of Adam, there has never been a garden without weeds, and this is because our hearts are in such a condition that a garden without weeds would be terrible for us.
If sinful men were given weedless gardens, this would simply prove that the garden had been entirely abandoned, and that they were the weeds.
So when a Christian community is a growing and thriving place, grumbles will grow, depend upon it. Everything depends on how the grumbles are handled. In ancient Israel, the problem with grumbling ran much deeper, and it was sometimes met with severe judgments from God. But in the New Testament, as the new Israel was growing, complaints sprang up as to how some of the widows were being neglected in the distribution of food (Acts 6:1). They handled it properly, and instead of the population being decimated, the result was that the community continued to grow (Acts 6:7). And as it continued to grow, changes came with it. And with those changes come challenges to our love.
A family reunion with 8 cousins is quite a different kind of affair than a family reunion with 58 cousins. You cannot have quantitative growth without affecting the qualitative growth, but—and this is the point—we have been commanded to grown quantitatively. You can fill in the rest of the argument.
One of the reasons the New Testament is filled with exhortations to love is that the explosive growth of the church would necessarily put stress on the love we had already been given. “Honour all men. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honour the king” (1 Pet. 2:17) “Show hospitality to one another without grumbling” (1 Pet. 4:9, ESV).
So grow the church. Tend the weeds. And if you want to know where the weeds are, check your own heart first.