We need a Paradigm Change – Badly!
Numbers occupy a lot of our lives. We have phone numbers, addresses, identification numbers such as SS or employee ID’s, licenses and much more.
Churches use numbers a lot too. We keep attendance, finance, and membership numbers, pardon the pun, “religiouslyâ€. The numbers we focus on in the church tell us something about what is important to us and can send the wrong message. Some would say they reinforce what is ailing the church.
The attendance numbers are the most important to us in the church. It is those numbers that tell us how well we are doing. We may say those numbers aren’t important and that they merely represent souls, but the unfortunate truth is we use them to tell us whether we are successful, regardless of how much we deny it. Membership is often another way of measuring our success. You see, our psyche makes us feel we need to get people to join us to be successful.
But what does attendance really say or mean? On one hand we like to say that the church is everywhere and not just in a building, but then the main thing we measure is how many people come to the building. The truly radical among us might also measure how many come to a once a week Bible study or Cell group and count that in the attendance number. We keep measuring how many come to something.
Interestingly, in pastoral reports we do measure how many people were saved but those numbers are typically miniscule compared to our attendance numbers, even in a small church. What does that say? We explain it away by the fact that most of the people that come to church are already saved. Then why are we spending such a high percentage of our service to God in merely attending? Why are most of our “ministries†centered around this act of attending, i.e. music, singing, teaching Sunday School, taking care of the building, etc.?
Isn’t attendance important? Well, let’s look at that. The passage we use most to validate this thought is Heb. 10:25 – “not giving up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but encouraging one another—and all the more as you see the Day approaching.†But in the same letter in chapter 3 verse 13 we are told “But encourage one another daily, as long as it is called “Today,†so that none of you may be hardened by sin’s deceitfulness.†I can’t go to church daily, it is just not feasible. So as long as I think of the church not only as a place but as ‘my’ group of people, i.e. the people who attend or are members of where I go to church I cannot obey Heb 3:13. If you examine Heb 10:25 more closely the real point of that verse is to gather for a purpose, which is specifically to encourage one another. It’s not the gathering that is important but the encouraging. So how can I obey Heb 3:13? I have to think of church differently. Church must become to me all of the followers of Christ, not just my group (my congregation, fellow church-maembers).
How did the early ‘church†view church? Didn’t they talk about numbers? Didn’t they keep track of how many people were fed miraculously? What about in Acts when it talks about how many people were added to their number? What about those things? The book of Revelation also mentions numbers as does other passages. But where do we find mention of the number of people attending church? The miraculous feedings tell us how many people were served by Christ (and one could say the church). The approximately 3000 added to their number on the day of Pentecost tells us of a great revival, but we never get a follow-up on how many attended weekly.
Ironically, counting numbers got David in trouble once. While the Lord told Moses in Exodus and Numbers and David once in 2nd Samuel to take a census; that was to organize, tax and put them to service. But I Chronicles 21:1 says “Satan rose up against Israel and incited David to take a census of Israel.†This didn’t turn out well because it was a matter of pride and arrogance rather than obedience. Is our attendance counting a matter of pride as well?