Success By the Numbers?

Sometimes big numbers mean hollow people.  Kader Attia. Ghost. 2008. Aluminum Foil Collection of Centre Georges Pompidou Musée d’Art National, Paris. Photo: Sandra Glahn

Today I'm happy to welcome Jennifer Callaway, who served as my intern last semester. She now lives in Arizona. My loss. 

Subscribe to any ministry magazine or cultural engagement blog, and you will be inundated with articles that educate, encourage, exhort and admonish you with statistics and studies about why people leave the church, what makes them stay, and what they want in a church. These articles tend to focus on gender, age group, ethnicity or some other marker of a people group. But they all have one goal: bring more people in the door. After all, that is the measure of success, right? Wrong.

I am more and more convinced that our biggest problem in the North American church is head-counting. It's all about bringing in the big numbers; people and dollars. And a church that doesn't attract big numbers is deemed a failure, along with those who lead it.

American business philosophy is running the church. And if the goal is big numbers and big bucks, then it follows that efficiency and marketing to the "right" demographic becomes the strategy for the number-one call and purpose of the church—making disciples of Jesus Christ.

I recently constructed a discipleship strategy based solely on the way Jesus made disciples in the Gospels. His strategy, if you want to call it that, was to call the masses, then challenge them to deeper and deeper levels. If they left, he let them go. And he ended up with 12. Out of that 12 was birthed an even smaller group that went to the deepest level with him. And that small band of people changed the world. It just makes me wonder, how much could a much smaller, but much more committed church accomplish?

What has gone wrong? How have we shifted so dramatically in our focus? Think about it. Deep discipleship is hard. It is inefficient, time consuming, and uncomfortable. It requires focused time with a handful of people rather than a microphone and Power Point presentation. It means getting to know them well enough to not necessarily like them very much. In short, it means denying ourselves, taking up our crosses and following. Every day of our lives.

How did Jesus measure success? Faithfulness, self-denial, sacrifice, and service. This paints a radically different picture than a parking lot full of cars, a rock-concert atmosphere, and a Disneyland approach that has something for everybody.

I think ministry leaders would benefit greatly from a reconstruction of their views about success.