Revolutionary Church Plant Launches
Gang,
My friend Dwight Lefever 'launched' a church yesterday--a satellite of our New Providence Church. The MLI cohort that we are both a part of met this morning and, as you can imagine, everyone was loaded with questions for Dwight about how the day went.
Dwight was excited and reported a glorious first day. He described the gathering in almost complete detail. The part of the encouraging story he never mentioned was first thing that most would consider to the only meaningful mark of success.
The entire discussion of the day ran its course and Dwight never mentioned how many heinies they put in seats.
And, remarkably, no one in our cohort asked!
Eventually, I brought the issue up and told Dwight that I'd noticed and was excited that he has biblical values in mind.
Amazingly, even then, no one asked how many heinies there were and Dwight never said. We still don't know!
Maybe we are moving toward a church built on the New Testament plan. Maybe we WILL focus on making disciples.
posted by bill Sloat at 2:15 PM
2 Comments:
Bill,
I am much more surprised that your cohort is still meeting. I thought we had 'moved on' from the mli thing already. But it is surprising that no one asked.
I've just recently started to look at the whole idea of "counting" differently. We haven't counted how many are at our Sunday worship gatherings for years. However, whenever I am asked how many people attend our church, I still usually give a ballpark guess of that (around 75). But it just occurred to me that that is such a stupid way to count. Because there are WAY more people who are a part of our church "community." There are about 150 people who have in some way, shape, or form decided that they want to live out their faith as a part of our church group. Not all of them are able (or willing) to show up every single Sunday; and some participate in other ways.
So, anyway, maybe it's just me, but I don't know why I have always used the average Sunday morning attendance as a figure with any value (other than logistical things like number of seats and bulletins). We will still not count how many are there on Sunday mornings, but now when I am asked how big our church is - since I feel the need to give some kind of answer - I think it gives a better indication to say 150 instead of 75 (even though they are both still guestimates).
H,
Our cohort decided to continue to meet even before the last retreat. We all live within 60 miles of each other so our group has an easier time continuing than the other cohorts.
Starting in 012, we will be joining each other in missional activity rather than meeting to discuss retreats and books. IOW, we will be DOING it together, not merely talking about it together.
As far as counting is concerned:
My mind thinks in numbers all the time. Not a Sunday goes by that I do not count who joins in the gathering but we don't count officially and we never record a number. I also count how many participate with us in congregational acts of incarnation but we never record those numbers either. (It's a Matthew 6 thing for us.)
In my last MLI Fastfire Update, when we were asked to describe how we have changed our metrics, I said that we don't count anything but that what we value is the number who contribute to the expansion of the Kingdom, not the number of people whom we attract to consume our religious products and services. So, we never become excited by the number of heinies in our chairs but we do celebrate the numbers of hands and feet that serve when we come together to serve.
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