Measuring Success
I once heard a pastor of a large church make the accusation that pastoring a small church was a selfish endeavor. His view is that some pastors settle into a small church with a solid giving base and essentially just exist. At the time, I saw his point. There are thousands of dying churches made up of just enough people to pay their pastor and do little or nothing else but remain comfortable. Their pastors preach sermons designed to please Christians and keep up traditions. Pastors and churches like that have lost their focus on Jesus and on His great commission to make disciples. They are tragedies of evangelistic neglect.
However, there seems to be an often unspoken assumption on the part of many Christians that ministry success is measured by attendance and giving. Thus, big churches automatically get the label: "successful." Most of us know better than to speak this assumption out loud, but we live by it. It drives ministry efforts and controls budgets. Sermons and programing that retains givers and attenders are invested in heavily while ministry initiatives directed at orphans, widows, and anyone described in Matthew 25:31ff is given little or no support. Proactive, relational engagement with people other than Christians is neglected, often unintentionally. When giving and/or attendance is up, we speak of how thankful we are that "God is blessing" our ministry. When giving or attendance is down, we rake our staff over the coals that they aren't making enough of an effort.
The truth is that we have employed earthly metrics to measure human success and neglected the mission Jesus gave us: Make Disciples (Matthew 28:19-20).
“Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”
Discouragement
I ministered in a large church for nearly a decade. I put in a lot of hours, planned a lot of events, and preached a lot of sermons. I was well resourced (comparatively), reasonably well paid, and had a team of incredibly talented people working with me. While I can point to many people that we invested in, loved, and helped grow in Christ, I saw very few non-Christians become disciples.
Understand that there were many Christians who grew in Christ. I watched many novice Christians become more serious about their faith and many serious Christians grow deeper in their walks, but I saw very few people move from death into life as we see Paul describe in Ephesians 2:1-5.
“And you were dead in the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world...But God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved.”
I became very discouraged. We spent millions of dollars and had thousands of people hearing our teaching, but we were shamefully lacking in new believers. I loved discipling Christians to grow and was glad to see people recommitting to Jesus, but I knew that without regenerations we were not really fulfilling the Great Commission.
It wasn't that there weren't any new beleivers; it was that there wasn't many and few of them could be seen growing in Christ.
The discouragement grew deeper when I counted "hands" during a response after a sermon. We would have everyone bow their heads and close their eyes and raise their hands if they were committing to Christ. We would count hands, and those numbers would be added up to a yearly count. Sometimes we would count decision cards, but we almost never had relational contact.
Perhaps they were making genuine decisions to follow Jesus; maybe they just weren't paying attention and heard something about raising hands at the end of the sermon. We don't know, because they didn't trust Jesus in the context of relationship. And, without a meaningful disciple-making relationship there was no one there to lead them in their first steps to following Jesus. We had roughly 3,000 regular attendees on the roster, but we would be doing good if our salvation count was in the double digits over the course of a year. Given that even those numbers reflected our dubious "hands raised" method, we couldn't do much celebrating.
We were not making disciples effectively.
It would be easy to blame the pulpit, to accuse the teaching pastor of not encouraging evangelism enough. However, that wasn't the case. Plenty of energy went into sermons about evangelism. Classes about evangelism. We even did campaigns designed to build relationships and invite people to church. It wasn't completely ineffective, but it wasn't exactly effective either.
Attendance might increase, but salvations didn't (at least not by much).
Church Planting
Flash forward several years. Now, I am pastoring a tiny church that we planted with 8 adults and a few kids. We started in June of 2014 and at the time of my writing, 16 months have gone by since our first meeting. In that time nine people have trusted Jesus. We didn't count raised hands in a dark room while emotive music played. We didn't guess at how many of them were genuine. We didn't wonder whether or not any of them "got it." We connected with them, prayed for them, witnessed to them, and discipled them into relationships with Jesus. We watched them be regenerated by the Holy Spirit. We saw them change. We saw them tell their friends about what Jesus did. We held baptisms in an above ground pool. And, we didn't have to guess about anything, because we knew all of them. We watched them follow Jesus.
I've never before seen God bring people to Himself like He has this year.
Foolish But Effective
There are days when I think about how foolish this must seem to mega-church pastors. We don't have much money (We are about two low giving months away from not being able to pay me). We don't have many people (35 on a good Sunday). Our organization structures are lacking in the absence of administrative staff (Volunteers are stepping up, though!). We have no building to mark our presence (And no payment!).
However, if we are comparing stats, it makes sense to compare statistics between two of the five churches I have ministered in. These comparisons are purely anecdotal, reflecting my ministry experience. They are not based on national statistics, though they are not anomalies.
- Large Church: 3,000 people spend 3 million dollars to make 15 disciples in a year in a large church context. That is 1 disciple for every 200 people (0.5% disciple-making rate) and $200,000 per new disciple.
- Church Plant: 8 people (plus a whole lot of other people praying, giving, encouraging, and supporting) spend about $40k to make 9 disciples in a year in a house church context. That is 1.125 disciples for every 1 person (112.5% disciple-making rate) and $4,444 per new disciple.
| Church | Starting Attendance | $ Budget | Disciples Made | Attendee/Disciple Ratio | $/Disciple | Discipleship Rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Large Church | 3,000 | 3,000,000 | 15 | 200/1 | $200,000/disciple | 0.5% |
| Church Plant | 8 | 40,000 | 9 | 1/1.25 | $4,444/disciple | 112.5% |
