Certain people want to know how big your church is. What is your weekly attendance? How big is your youth group? What is your annual budget? The number matters to them. Perhaps they want to pigeonhole your church, or perhaps they want to pray intelligently. Perhaps they want to feel proud of their own church’s higher numbers, or perhaps they sincerely want to help you assess your situation. When I was pastoring a rather small church, tempted to be defensive about our embarrassingly small numbers, I embraced the mantra that we aren’t called to be successful, just faithful. I still am quite guarded when someone wants to give church statistics too large a role in their decision-making process. I want to say, “Yes, our attendance is only this, and yes our budget is only that, but jump to no hasty conclusions until you hear what God has been doing among us!” Some signs of life are not easily quantified. We may be small, but we’re not dead yet.
But I was recently challenged to jettison the “faithfulness rather than success” mantra, by reading Andrew Heard’s book entitled Growth and Change. He makes the case that numbers matter to God because numbers represent people. We sometimes hide our laziness and our foolish commitment to bad methods behind a misapplied belief in the truth of God’s sovereignty. Just because God is the one who gives the increase doesn’t mean I should never analyse and improve my approach to seed-planting and watering. Rather than pitting faithfulness against success, we should pray and plan for fruitfulness. We should care about bearing fruit. It seems to be a big deal to Jesus. In John 15:16, He says, “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you that you should go and bear fruit.” While fruitfulness cannot always be reduced to a number, the assumption of the agricultural metaphor is that when you walk into the orchard at harvest time you are either impressed that there are several tons of fruit on the trees, or you are dismayed that each tree has just a dozen or so pieces of fruit dangling from random branches. Farmers have to be brutally practical about these things: they would be wise to root out the bad tree and replace it with one that will reproduce. Reproduction is one sign of a mature and healthy organism.
Believing that healthy church growth correlates with intentional effort and goal setting, and knowing that effective goals need to be specific, someone might commit themselves to these three quantifiable goals: 1) We’re praying for twenty conversions in our church this year. 2) We’re taking specific steps so that our average attendance might rise by 50%. 3) We are challenging people to increase their giving so we can double our giving to missions this year. What do you think? I like these goals. Paying attention to numbers is not inherently evil. You are not more holy or spiritual if you ignore numbers. You are not necessarily treating church like a business if you want to assess a ministry’s numerical fruitfulness. Church statistics should rarely be the single factor in making decisions, but numbers are summaries of reality. Some of us get all philosophical about how numbers don’t matter that much, until the number has to do with our salary.
Should we discontinue the youth group because only three people are coming? Should we cancel small group this week because half of us will be out of town? Should we assume that the pastor of the big church has a surplus of wisdom to teach us, and assume that the small church pastor should never be the guest speaker at the conference? If financial giving is consistently down, whom do we blame? While an awareness of numbers is indispensable, knowing what to do in light of the numbers requires wisdom. Behind every number there is a person, but since each person bears God’s image, each person is of unquantifiable value. Church work is people work, people work is image-bearer work, and when God is present, infinity is in the room.
How interested is the Bible in numbers? Well, it even has a book entitled Numbers in which whole tribes are reduced to numbers for an interesting set of purposes: a) battle readiness – how many soldiers do we have; b) God’s faithfulness – a statistical update on God’s promise to make Abraham’s descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky; c) God’s glory – the vast multitude exiting Egypt demonstrates God’s power, the impressive scope of redemption; d) humility – Moses tells the people that it was not because they were the most numerous nation that God chose them (Deuteronomy 7:7). Rarely should we draw just one lesson from church statistics. There are usually several lessons to be learned.
God commanded Moses to take a census, but He punished King David for taking a census. What was David thinking? When your righthand man Joab tells you not to number the fighting men, but you do it anyway, it might be because Satan has incited you to do it (1 Chronicles 21:1). While we’re not told exactly what David’s motives were, it seems he was either driven by pride (look how big my kingdom is now), or fear (I wonder if I can afford to trust God or if I need to start making plans of my own). Ask yourself: is my interest in church numbers driven by anxiety and arrogance, or is it part of a wise response to Jesus’ call to bear fruit?
Jesus was fruitful, typically attracting not just two or three souls, but multitudes. Just think of the crowded house that forced the four friends in Mark 2:4 to carry their paralysed buddy up to the flat roof and lower him through the broken ceiling tiles. New Testament numbers are usually round approximate numbers – the feeding of the five thousand, the feeding of the four thousand, God adding three thousand converts to the church in Acts 2:41. The fact that these numbers are large indicates the abundant blessing of God. The fact that they are rounded indicates that the point is not the exact number but the growth of the kingdom of God. Acts 2:47 tells us “The Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.” The point is not whether Peter’s church was growing faster than John’s church, or whether we should stop supporting the under-achieving missionary. The point is the big picture – God is growing His church. The man in Jesus’ parable who turned five talents into ten was rewarded with extra, but even the person who turned two talents into four was commended. Only the man who did nothing was rebuked. The lesson is God’s expectation of growth, not hitting certain benchmarks in order to stay in the club. In Revelation 7:9 we end up with a multitude so great that no one can count it. My hunch is that we will have a different relationship with numbers in eternity.
As summaries of somewhat complicated stories, numbers require wise interpretation. The church I planted in Salem, Oregon struggled for years. We could never seem to press beyond certain growth barriers. Influential people wanted to close it down, but she was a late bloomer, doubling in size after I had moved on. Now she’s one of the largest congregations in her presbytery. A small church is not necessarily a horse with a broken leg that needs to be put out of its misery; she might just need some fertilizer and another year like the tree in Luke 13:7-9.
Hebrews 13:15 says that in Christ we are to “continually offer up a sacrifice of praise to God, that is, the fruit of lips that acknowledge his name.” In our pursuit of fruitfulness, let us remember the fruit of our lips, the unquantifiable fruit that is the worship of the immeasurably glorious Triune God. When gathering together to worship the Lord on the Lord’s Day, the most important thing is not how many worshipers are present, but the value of the God being worshiped.
