Numbers

Within Church of Christ circles recently, there has been much sturm und drang about a recent report by the Christian Chronicle (a Church of Christ publication) about the decline of numbers within Churches of Christ (80,000 within the last 6 years). I'm not going to rehash what others have said; you yourself can read John Dobbs, Matt Dabbs, and Mike Cope. Those three and several others have had good thoughts and perspectives on this.

What I will say is that while a focus on numbers of adherents/attendees/whatever is something that every church thinks about, it really does miss the point. Sure, on one hand, having a lot of people attend your church can make you feel better about the "popularity" of your congregation, but the truth is that all of that is just a facade. Just because a congregation might have a lot of attendees doesn't mean it has a lot of people trying to be like Jesus. It might just mean that people have found the new "cool" church (and I say that as someone who attended a "cool" church in my teen years).

What should be the judge and what is much harder to objectively quantify is how much people are looking like Jesus, whether in a congregation of 1300 or 30. And it's hard because we can't judge a person's heart. We can only be the people that prod and poke and encourage and pray that people come to exemplify the Fruit of the Spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control. And that they come to exemplify Christ.

Worry about numbers doesn't do us any good, in my mind. What should worry us is if we have huge numbers of people in our congregations, but very few of them look like followers of Jesus. That would be a much more significant problem.