Success


How do you measure success? How would you measure your churches success?

I’ve been thinking about this lately as we end 2006 and prepare for 2007. Our theme for 2007 is Making Noise. Now I like that theme and I really do believe it is one given by God for our upcoming year but lets face it, what noise?

Recently I was in a restaurant where a couple of kids decided to get noisy. They made noise, trust me on that one. When I drop something that is breakable it makes noise. How do I measure whether or not I am making the right noise?

This is what has struck me recently. I think believers often times measure success the wrong way. I think we use the world’s way of measuring success. In fact, I’m not to sure that what we have decided to call success is in many cases failure, and miserable failure at that.

Imagine what problems this causes in the body of Christ. If I think something is successful what am I most likely going to do? You know exactly what will happen, I will copy it. So we copy failure and then measure that failure and say it is success. Not healthy.

Not that long ago I was reading about a new church plant that was called a success. Why? Because they started their first service with 500 people and ended up a month later with 1500. Very impressive? Successful? Where did that number come from? If I told you that 97% of those people came from other churches in the area would you still call it success?

Now when one starts to question this they are called jealous, jealous of others success of course, and simply ignored, but my problem is not with success but whether or not what we believers call success is success at all.

In fact what if all these new mega church plants are only hiding our problems? What if they are just reshuffling attendance numbers? Imagine a town losing a business and thousands of jobs to the community up the road, would we really call that success? I thought it was called relocation.

Do you want to know a hidden secret that no one is talking about? Small churches bring more people to Christ than the large ones. Did you know that small bodies of believers are growing at a much faster rate than any other size fellowship? The problem is not with success but with how we measure success. A network of house churches in California has over 100 within their fellowship averaging between 18 and 25 in each home.

What is even more striking is the fact that the numbers are turned on their ear when it comes to those who were believers versus those who are new children of God.

Be careful how you measure success, because it will impact your goals and aims.