Go to any type of meeting with more than one pastor in the room there will always be talk about how things are going in one another's churches. This is really code for "how may people do you got at worship". Sometimes that question is even asked point blank. This is how we have come to measure "success" in reaching people for Christ. This is often reinforced in the reporting of statistics to judicatories.
I am not one to say numbers do not matter. They do. More correctly it is the people behind the numbers that matter, or should matter to us, and definitely matter to God. These are people who had no hope before they met Christ, whose marriage was failing, or who were chained by addictions.
However, worship/ membership numbers do not tell the whole story and cannot. How then can we measure how faithful we are being to making disciples of Jesus Christ? That is a hard question.
One thing we surely need to do is move beyond the counting of "club" members and their financial contributions as the only reflection of faithfulness. In Reggie McNeal's words in The Present Future: Six Tough Questions for the Church "The church in North America is thoroughly modern. It has reduced its understanding of spirituality to numbers that can be reported (the triumph of materialism over spirit)."
How can we begin to measure how people are growing spiritually, how many people are "not yet" followers of Christ but attending worship in a church, how many conversations church members have had with pre-Christian people, how many people have been transformed by mission trips etc.?
What and how will we measure? Will we measure using the "modern" way of sola numero "numbers alone" or recognize that being faithful to the Great Commandment and the Great Comission is so much more?
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