A day in the life...of the numbers game

Today Lisa was asked into a new school to talk about her faith, why she does what she does and to talk about a (typical?!) day in the life of a church planting Salvation Army officer. A great opportunity, everything was going well until the four 'representative Christian leaders' were asked how 'big' their respective churches are.

Church leader one: '150, and there were 18 when I arrived three years ago.'

Church leader two: '900 - there were 5 of us 10 years ago.'

Church leader three: '6,000, and there were 6 of us when we started 10 years ago.'

Lisa: '3.'

(I'm led to believe there was a suitably impressed response to the first three answers while disbelief at Lisa's response gave way to unabashed amusement!)

Thankfully, there seems to be enough 'evidence' to suggest that God doesn't necessarily measure success in terms of size - I mean, David wasn't selected to fight Goliath becasue of his height; mustard seeds aren't very big; and Jesus' own answer to the question would most likely have been '12'. I think we're more interested in developing influence rather than numbers. Mind you (little plug coming!) if a few like minded people came our way and wanted to share the ride we certainly wouldn't object, but we're not really into the numbers game. If I was into numbers I'd mention that we had an 'all-time high' 30 at Little Acorns this morning (which we only started 7 weeks ago!), but I'm not so I won't (doh!).