On Churches and Numbers

As a new church planter, the struggle to maintain a healthy view concerning the number of people at your church is ever present. As a leadership team, we have been preaching to ourselves that the primary orientation of our hearts in reference to this struggle should be a resolve to simply be faithful to what God has called the church to be and to seek to do that over the course of decades.  Faithfulness is the goal.  Faithfulness in evangelism, discipleship, love, and service.  When that happens, the church happens.

This quote was encouraging to me along those lines.

Reviewing, then, the teaching of the New Testament, one would have to say that, on the one hand, there is joy in the rapid growth of the church in its earliest days, but that, on the other hand, there is no evidence that the numerical growth of the church is a matter of primary concern.

There is no shred of evidence in Paul’s letters to suggest that he judged the churches by the measure of their success in rapid numerical growth, nor is there anything comparable to the strident cries of some contemporary evangelists that the salvation of the world depends upon the multiplication of believers.

There is an incomparable sense of seriousness and urgency as the apostle contemplates the fact that he and all people “must appear before the judgment seat of Christ” and as he acknowledges the constraint of Jesus’ love and the ministry of reconciliation that he has received (2 Cor. 5:10-21). But this nowhere appears as either an anxiety or an enthusiasm about the numerical growth of the church.

Lesslie Newbign, The Open Secret, 126.

Kevin DeYoung reflects on this quote here.