Does It Add Up?

The Church seems to be fascinated with numbers. How many in worship? How many baptisms? What’s your budget?

Gallons of ink, literal and electronic, have been spilt sorting through data as it relates to the Church. Of course George Barna is the Data King. And what his organization pumps out directs the conversation all over the Church about what to do or what not to do, what’s going to happen, what needs to change.

In my own circle it seems we are dazzled by data. We have statistics about worship attendance, baptisms, confirmations, deaths. We have statistics about the number of pastors and teachers and their ages and length of service. We have statistics about where Lutherans are and where they are not. We have statistics about sizes of Circuits and Districts relative to one another. We spend lots of time and money reviewing data. We dive into the data surfaced by Barna and his compadres.

Numbers are good. As someone reminded me, they are, as we speak about such things, First Article considerations. They do help us reason, to a point, about the future based on the past and the present.

Numbers are featured in the Bible, and I don’t mean the book which might better be titled In the Wilderness (based on the Hebrew name). We hear about 12 apostles. We know that in the post resurrection appearance the net held 153 fish. We know that on the Day of Pentecost about 3,000 people got saved. Certainly, during Old Testament times a lot of counting and reporting of numbers occurred.

Dazzling data indeed.

But it was not always good. Somewhat oddly David brought judgment upon himself when he counted his men in II Samuel 24. Was he tempted by pride? Was he tempted by comfort in the number? And what does it mean that God incited him to do that?

Not sure. But it does mean that numbering things is not always good.

Actually, I am a numbers guy. Math runs in my family, although not very fast in me. But here’s my thought. Does being dazzled by data keep us stuck in the past or present? Can it forestall thinking better about the future if we must always measure it according to the past? They say past is prologue, and I believe it, but maybe not always.

When the Church gets too dazzled by the data does it, again as we speak about such things, forget about the Third Article, the work of the Holy Spirit? Do we get fixated on where we have been instead of what God can do? Or do we think God can only do what he has done in the past and that he can only do future things in terms of that past? Are there new ways he can work? Are there new things he can do?

They did not see 3,000 people coming to faith on one day on that Day of Pentecost. They hadn’t seen it before. The past could not have predicted what the Holy Spirit was to do that day… and then more in the days that followed. Or take the resurrection itself. That was a statistical surprise!

So just this. Let’s not get too dazzled by the data. Let’s not get duped into thinking our knowledge of it can give us power to control the future of the Church by the application of the data of the past. Sure we use it as a tool for thinking about the work of the Church. But let’s not forget that there is that Third Article to the Creed, a third person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. And that Spirit blows when and where he pleases. Yes, we can count what he has done previously and suspect that he might continue to work that way tomorrow and the next day.

Neither dazzled nor discouraged! Regardless of what you do know, you never know about the future. God does surprising things in surprising ways at surprising times. Remember it upset YWHW because they did not believe in God and did not trust his saving power. (Psalm 78:22) After all, he is able to do “far more abundantly than all we ask to think.” (Ephesians 3:20) Sometimes the past does not add up to the future.