Tonight Cloey and I went to the Willow Creek Leadership Summit at the Big V. I actually recorded some stuff for a podcast and will hopefully post it tomorrow… its late now and I need to go to bed.
But I wanted to record these thoughts before I “turned in” (which is an odd expression). So tonight at the Big V (Cincinnati’s premier Vineyard, its really big and birthed most of the other Vineyards in the area… so it gets called the Big V) tonight someone found out that I am part of a little V… a teeny tiny v really. Vineyard Central. And the FIRST question out of her mouth was, “are you growing?” I was taken aback by this question for three reasons:
1. I assumed she meant are we growing numerically… and I realized that metric was so far from my mind that it sounded foreign, almost like someone had asked “do you serve eggplant at your church meals?”…. well yeah, sometimes, but huh?
2. While I assume she meant numerically… my second thought was not are we adding individuals to our church but are we adding more churches to our network.
3. And this is probably most significant… I wasn’t offended by her question! This is really what took me aback, because for the last 2 years I’ve been unlearning the modern church’s obsession with “bigger is better” and for a while I was mortified if people asked the “numbers question”. But instead I had a flash of thoughts that went something like this…..
“wow, I hadn’t even considered growing numerically as a primary [ie. first question somebody asks you] metric for church health/vitality…. i guess we are… we have several new HCs on the verge of starting… but really what I hear her saying is “I want to know that your church is doing well and I don’t have any better way to ask cuz this is all I’ve been taught to look for as a measure of church health”…. what we really need is to help people have better metrics… a more holistic measurement of ‘how a church is doing’ and then better questions can be asked of one another instead of the ‘numbers questions’……”
So, please don’t read this as a rant against numbers or a rant against people asking about numbers. That’s not what I’m saying. If anything I guess its a plea for the church to teach itself how to ask better questions and to do so in humility. And its a confession that I have been arrogant about touting numbers and arrogant about abhorring them too. What is it to grow? It is God-life infused into us. I reckon it will look all manner of ways – numeric being one of many.
