In Vietnam, the US army used body counts to show it was winning the war. Measuring progress was difficult but the body count made it simple. The public quickly doubted the veracity and usefulness of these figures.
In the 2003 invasion of Iraq, US General Tommy Franks famously said, ‘We don’t do body counts.’ Maybe they were worried about bad publicity, maybe they had learned lessons about how to assess progress.
Churches do body counts. The most common description of a church is its size. How else could you measure progress? The body count is simple. More people are coming last year than this year - that’s got to be a win doesn’t it?
Here are some of the problems about measuring success by attendance
- Ministers lie about the numbers - so much so that the common wisdom is to count the actual giving and not the claimed attendance.
- Attendance does not tell you the nature of the growth - is it evangelistic, biological, ‘good’ transfer, or ‘bad’ transfer?
- Attendance at the church does not neatly equate to gospel penetration of the suburb/parish
- Attendance is not a qualitative measure - there is a crowd but are they growing in Godliness?
- People leaving the church may be a ‘blessed subtraction.’ Sometimes growth will happen after a large number of people leave. At other times, people leave to enter missions or ministry training or a church plant.
- Size is not a measure of growth - a church of 400 that stays at 400 for 5 years may seem more impressive than the church of 50 that goes to 60 in one year but which is growing?
Attendance is too blunt an instrument to rely on. It is a good servant but a bad master and needs to be read very carefully.
The minister who is held to account by the number of people attending his church will feel real pressure to aim for the wrong things: the quickest way to grow numbers is by transfer growth. So put on a better show than the church down the road - compete with them for the pool of Christians in the area.
As lots of churches do that we lose the vision for the unchurched around us. Thinking like this makes it harder to be generous and give yourself away - sending ‘your’ precious numbers to minister elsewhere. Also much harder to do the long slow and small work with people further from the gospel. We’ll abandon the places and tribes that won’t produce impressive numbers.
For these reasons, I don’t like body counts.
But let’s not give up trying to assess progress. Rather we need to come up with a better way of measuring it than posteriors on pews. How would you measure progress?
[edited 8am]
