Behold I Stand at The Door And Count!
11 O Clock Sunday Morning isn’t just the most segregated hour in America it’s also the most carefully measured hour in America.
Clickers, calculators, fingers, pen, paper and mental notes, are deployed in church sanctuaries tallying up how many “head we ran”. A pastors’ self-esteem hangs precipitously in the balance as the volunteer clickers and counters ruthlessly calculate his worth. Mothers Day bumps it up and Daylight Savings drops it down. He goes home after church and scours the list of Outreach Magazine’s 100 largest churches knowing he will never be on that list. Forget about making the list of The 100 largest churches, most pastors rarely see 100 people in attendance on Sunday.
Numerical Failures
I was a failure as a pastor.
Not a moral, financial or spiritual failure.
No, what I did was worse.
I was a numerical failure.
The Measure of a Disciple
The Church talks a lot about making disciples but has yet to develop a meaningful way to ascertain whether somebody is one. What the church has become universally sophisticated at measuring however is the number of people who sit in a building at 11 O Clock on Sunday morning. We learned how to do this from our Big Church media mentors, Hybels, Osteen, Jakes, Warren, Stanley and Driscoll.
All the talk about the importance of making disciples not withstanding, the other 95% of us (Club 95) who can barely garner an audience of 108 people know that what really counts is how many people are sitting in the room listening to us. We’ve come to believe this because human beings have this weird habit of paying attention to what people do more than what people say.
Bottom line: Those of us who make up the Club 95 feel like failures because relative to this ruthless metric we are failures.
What Would Jesus Count?
The irony is that, none of us (including the above named) really believe that Jesus cares about this kind of counting at all. We know that there’s zero biblical evidence that Jesus ever measured his success by the number of people seated in front of him during one of his big crowd talks. (Imagine Jesus deploying the disciples during the Sermon on the Mount each equipped with a hidden abacus under their robe and instructions to not appear as if they’re counting heads ☺)
You’re laughing because you know it’s true.
Counting What Counts
What if we stopped counting Buildings, Budgets and Butts in seats?
What if we stopped counting the sitting and started counting the serving?
What if we found a new (and dare I say more biblical) way of measuring success than Big Church?
What if we flipped the idea of Big Church on its head?
What if we called it Church Big instead?
What if we started counting what (really) counts – like the number of stories about how your church is serving the community?
What if we figured out how to measure our success based on Matthew 25 – what we do for the least, the helpless and the homeless?
What if people talked behind our backs about the good we do rather than what we believe?
What would count? How would we count? How would we spread this “invisible math”?
I know it’s easier to count heads than it is to count stories but who said being a disciple was easy? Isn’t that why it’s called discipline?
Can’t followers of Jesus be at least as focused, shrewd and disciplined as business, science, major league baseball and even Google who’ve all figured out how to count things that were previously invisible, buried or seemingly irrelevant.
Why cant the church follow suit? Better yet why shouldn’t followers of Jesus host and foster a movement that connects practitioners of kindness and promotes them regardless of whether or not they currently believe the way we do?
Jesus taught us to judge a tree by its fruit not by its name
Seth Godin has never taken prisoners when it comes to the abject waste of time that most of us think college is. His post is killer. But as I read it, I think of pushing back on pastors. 
