From the BlogBlog (Ryan Bolger): Are Numbers Evil?
I taught a class on church growth for the first time this last quarter. It was small — 15-20 of us in a circle, discussing Donald McGavran and everything else church growth has meant since the 1960s. It was highly engaged, I simply had to introduce a topic and the conversations flowed.
One interesting conversation we had was regarding numbers.
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But what if what we counted dealt with Jesus-like activities? What if we counted how many in our congregation did activities for the poor, opened their house to their neighbors, participated in acts of justice? In this way, what we track in our churches is in synch with our stated theology; our numbers 'in church' are those who follow Jesus into the world. In our church growth class, we came to the conclusion that when we track kingdom-like activity instead of static church membership rolls, we come closer to McGavran's goal of numbers as a window into the work of the Holy Spirit.
Seminarians being taught to effectively use numbers? What is the world coming to??? Jesus' return must be at hand. It warms the cockles of my little charts and graphs heart.
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