Why are so many church leaders obsessed with church size?
It seems an inescapable reality, at least in the circles I move in, that the number of people who attend a church on Sunday is the most commonly accepted metric for appraising how well a church is doing, even amongst people who openly admit that numbers shouldn’t be the main thing.
Size of congregation is one of the first things leaders will ask other leaders about when trying to gauge how things are going; it’s one of the first things leaders will say about their own church when trying to communicate faith or vision; it’s an almost indispensable part of the mini-bio for leadership conference speakers (“Mr. X leads a church with Y people attending on a Sunday”).
Here I am writing about it, yet I still find it hard, when asked “how are things in Eastbourne and Seaford?” by a fellow leader, to stop our weekly attendance number from being part of my answer. Many readers may share my experience.
Yet almost nobody I know actually thinks that church attendance figures are the best, or even a particularly helpful, barometer of church health. So why do we do it?
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I’ve heard a number of theories, some positive, some negative.
On the positive side, some say that it’s because numbers represent people, and people matter to God. Which they do, but that doesn’t explain why I assume a large congregation is more successful than a small number; gather five congregations in a town together, and you’d have a much bigger number but no more people overall, so I don’t think that can be it. Others make a very similar point about unbelievers getting saved, but that involves the assumption that the bigger you are, the more people get converted in your church, which both anecdotally and empirically doesn’t ring true (and why do people so rarely say, “X people have been baptized this year”?)
When it comes to introducing leaders, some reason that church size is simply a way of establishing the leadership credentials and gift of the individual, but again, this ignores important dynamics like location and history (seeing a village church grow from 100 to 200 might require more leadership gift than maintaining a city congregation of 300, for instance), not to mention making it sound like Jesus wasn’t a very effective leader (120? Pah!).
Not only that, but the skeptic would make the obvious point that there are church leaders who gather thousands by preaching a false gospel, so how can size indicate health? Tricky.
