Here’s a great quote from Tony Payne. It speaks volumes to churches that rely on the same marketing tactics and progress reports that are being utilized by corporate culture, rather than biblical measures as defined in this quote:
The measure of how ministry is progressing in your church or fellowship, and the way to evaluate whether you are making progress, is not attendance on Sunday, signed up members, people in small groups, or the size of our budget (as important and valuable as all these things are!). The real test is how successfully you are making disciples who make other disciples. Are we seeing people converted from being dead in their transgressions to being alive in Christ? And once converted, are we seeing them followed-up and established as mature disciples of Jesus? And as they become established, are we training them in knowledge, godliness and skills so that they will in turn make disciples of others?
This is the Great Commission—the making of disciples who obey all that Christ has taught, including the command to make disciples. And this is the touchstone of our faithfulness to Christ’s mission in the world, and the sign of a healthy church: whether or not it is making genuine disciple-making disciples of Jesus Christ.
The point here is to throw the quantitative measurements for spiritual growth and ministry progress out the window! These are qualitative processes that take a lot of time. We can’t measure them quantitatively (with numbers).
Not only that, we don’t have the power or strength to open the eyes of the spiritually blind, or to raise those who are dead in sin to new life in Christ – God does that all by Himself. We are called to live as His people, for when people first hear about Jesus, they see us and our lives. They don’t immediately see through us to the Savior. Let that be our goal: to point the world to Jesus. To be transparent to the Messiah.
And as we point the world to Christ, let us do away with quantitative measurements as proof of church growth. Let us instead turn to a more Scriptural test: fruit. Are we making disciples who make other disciples?
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I completely follow you, Dan (I think)…I’ve been wrestling with this question of measurement for a couple of years now (along with my fellow laborers in Christ). So, how do we measure discipleship and fruit? What do you think? One of the things I’ve been leaning towards is “discipleship stories” – that is, actual narratives of discipleship happening. It doesn’t graph very well though (and as an artist/pastor, I love colorful graphs)!
Hey Steve! Thanks for stopping by. Narratives of discipleship sounds like a very biblical way of describing growth to me, but perhaps this isn’t even a measurement. I also know some of this is merely semantic
Since I’m not the harvester, I don’t need to track how many seeds I’ve planted. I just sow as many as I can, ensuring I sow them well (quality planting, not just quantity planting). I have a general idea when I “see” growth in the field, often through people sharing their stories. But God is the harvester, and He not only knows people’s hearts but also how many hairs are on their heads. Don’t get me wrong, there are times where numbers become apparent (3,000 were baptized on the day of Pentecost as recorded in Acts 2, for instance). But this was the relation of factual information, not boasting about growth. I doubt that all 3,000 of them remained in the faith, and Paul and Luke seem to be cognizant of this throughout Acts (Paul warns the Ephesian elders in Acts 20 that “fierce wolves” will attempt to sabotage the flock, and even some of the elders will teach distortions of the truth).
I think the key here is learning to stop using terminology of “in” and “out” as descriptively as we always have. There are several instances where people are called “believers” or “disciples” of Jesus in the Bible, but they clearly were not by our modern definition of the terms. For instance, the Jews “who believed in Jesus” in John 8:31ff, who Jesus eventually calls children of the devil. The apostles also made it clear continually that they were missing the point, and Jesus even rebukes Peter as Satan (Matthew 16:23). The reality is that none of us really “get it” completely. We continually become aware of deeper nuances and truths to which we were previously blind. But we’re all on the same path and journey as disciples of Christ. Would we tell a plumbing apprentice on the first day of work that because he can’t fix a toilet he isn’t really an apprentice? Neither should we doubt whether someone is a disciple just because they don’t behave in a way we would expect or know information we think is important.
Discipleship is not a philosophy, program, nor a model. It is an apprenticeship under the Lordship of Jesus the Messiah. And like most apprenticeships, it can be a long and messy process. In fact, Jesus promises that it will last for a LOOOONG time
Thanks Dan! You ended right where I keep coming back to…messy and long! I like to use the term “generational change,” meaning discipleship happens over long periods of time – lifetimes, if you will. God bless and keep you in the grace of Jesus!