If you are a “church” person or church leader, you’ve likely already formed an opinion regarding the title of this post. You may have thought of contemporary “growth strategies” for how to more effectively fill seats on weekend services. Or perhaps you made a judgment that churches who are “all about the numbers” are weak doctrinally, and weaker still in their discipleship, teaching, and preaching. Allow me five minutes to explain why my church is crazy about the numbers.
First of all, you should acknowledge that “big” churches are not intrinsically bad…
- Jesus had upwards of 20,000+ people following His ministry at various points.
- 3,000 came to Christ in one “service” on the day of Pentecost.
- 5,000+ were in the church of Jerusalem within a few short months.
- The church of Ephesus mentioned in Acts 19 likely consisted of several thousand people.
The fact that numbers are used to give us a picture of the metric growth of the church as it spread should be an indication. Now, there is such thing as an inappropriate view of the numbers. True, a church growing in number is not necessarily healthy. But it is also true that a healthy church should grow. Growth is a result of health. Not the other way around.
I’m all about the numbers because each number represents a real person. A life. Someone that Jesus died to save. The numbers of people coming to my church, are real people with real needs, searching for real answers that are available by a real God. The numbers are not simply measurements and benchmarks that we give high-fives over.
The numbers tell stories of people who were far from God that were awakened with life in Christ. They tell of the couple that was on the edge of divorce who found grace, forgiveness, and forbearance through the love of Christ. The numbers tell me about the woman who walked in feeling too broken to come to God but decided to try anyway, and gave her life to Jesus and found freedom and hope. The numbers tell me of a couple about to call it quits after living together for a year, who are now married, happy, healthy, and passionate about the lives being changed at our church and the change that Jesus made in them.
The numbers speak! It’s not just 1, 2, 3, 4… It’s Tyler, Marcus, Randy, Brian, Josie, Tiffany, Karla, Jason, Sarah, Andrew, Todd… It’s not about me, or an ego boost, or a fist-bump after the service. The numbers are an objective non-biased worship to the God who is redeeming people in our community. Someone once made the comment that they don’t count people in the services of their church because “it’s not about the numbers anyway.” They were asked if their church counted the offering, which was an awkward but obvious, “yes.” The other person simply pointed out that you count what matters to you!
We count people, because people count to us. So am I focused on the numbers? You better believe it. We love people. And we love the change that the Gospel brings to their life. We want to see more lives changed by the Gospel. And we’re going to continue to do everything we can to reach them. We’ll stop at nothing because they matter to God and they matter to us… count on it.
Blessings,
John