Metrics

Trinity Presbyterian Church of Bethesda
02.04.08; Rev. David Williams

How do you know that a church is succeeding? Is our church succeeding?

I don’t know how often all of you think about this question, but for some inexplicable reason, I think about it a whole bunch. In fact, there’s a whole industry of pastoral consultants and church growth experts who hold workshops and publish books and manuals that claim to tell church leaders what it means to have a healthy congregation.

One of the first things that you’re going to find some of these professional church growers telling you is that you’ve got to know what’s going on in your church. To do that, you’ve got to figure out what metrics to use to measure success or failure. What do I mean by metrics? I’m not talking about the metric system, that logical decimally based system of measurement that everyone in the world uses. Everyone but Americans, that is, who are too thick-headed to give up the English system of measurement even though the English themselves haven’t used it for a generation. A metric just means a way of measuring something, of determining it’s value against a set standard. So...what are the metrics by which we know a church is healthy? There are many.

If you’ve seen pictures of church life back in the 1980s and early 1990s, one of the primary metrics of a healthy church seemed to be how much hair your pastor or pastors had. By that standard, we here at Trinity...well...let’s just say we’re not doing as well as we once were.

In the South for most of the 20th century, one of the primary metrics of how well your church was doing was the size and sparklyness of your pastor’s ride. The more expensive-looking and shiny the car, the better your church must be doing. If we use that approach here at Trinity...well...it depends which pastor we’re looking at. If you split the difference, then we’re probably doing OK, but fortunately most church growth consultants don’t use that measure.

There are other standards, like how much money you take in and how big your budget is, or how large your church building is, or how many programs you run, or how many children you have enrolled in your education program. But of all of the metrics that we have, the gold standard for church health on which all consultants seem to agree is worship attendance. If people are committed to church, they come to worship. If they come to worship, you can count them. That gives you a number every single worship. If that number goes down, things are bad. If that number goes up, things are good. It’s a nice clear quantitative standard, straightforward and easy to track. You can put those numbers into a spreadsheet and create charts and graphs and Powerpoint presentations to impress your congregation. If your church has a huge worship, it’s a guarantee that it’s a success.

Isn’t it? Isn’t that what it’s all about?

What did we hear from the Bible today?

From Micah of Moresheth, prophet to the people of Israel, we heard an aggressive challenge from God to God’s people. Micah preached in the southern kingdom of Judah in the eighth century before Christ, at a time at which the Assyrian Empire stormed across the ancient near East.

Unlike the priests in the temple in Jerusalem, Micah didn’t convey the message that Jerusalem could never fall because it was protected by God. Instead, Micah’s message was that the people of Judah were wrong about what mattered to God, and that all of their misplaced expectations about what God thought was important could cost them dearly.

So through Micah, Judah gets a challenge from God. It’s not just any challenge, but a covenant challenge, where through Micah the Creator of the universe takes his people to task for failing to uphold their end of the agreement they’d made with God. How do we know it’s a covenant challenge? First, creation itself is called to stand as a witness, which throughout the Bible is an indicator of a covenant between God and humankind. Second, several obscure events and places are mentioned. They may not mean much to us, but they meant a whole bunch to the people back then.

Who were King Balak of Moab and Balaam son of Beor? In Numbers 22-24, Balak tries to have the prophet Balaam curse the Israelites, but he says he can’t because God protects them. Where are Shittim and Gilgal? They’re on either side of the river Jordan, which Jacob crossed when he was given the name Israel. Those citations are a sign of God’s presence with Israel. But as Micah proclaims it, something has gone wrong with what Israel thinks it’s supposed to bring into their relationship with God.

God doesn’t measure their faith by numbers. He also didn’t measure their faith by how well they pulled off worship, or how large their worship was. Micah describes a perfect temple worship, with exactly the right offerings, and then multiplies that by ten. But what does that mean to God? Thousands of rams? Meaningless. Ten thousands of rivers of oil? Sure, the priests down at the temple cared a great deal about that, but did God? No. God doesn’t count heads. God doesn’t check plate receipts, be they in dollars or livestock. Those ways of measuring your faithfulness to God just aren’t what God cares about. To be successful in following God’s covenant, God has laid out the metrics pretty clearly:

Do justice. Love kindness. Walk humbly with your God. Nothing more. Nothing less.

That problem with metrics seems to have plagued the early church as well. In the first reading we heard today from the letter to the church at Corinth, the Apostle Paul is still in the middle of challenging those pesky Corinthians. As you may...or may not...remember from last week, the church at Corinth was really into division and infighting, into proving who was strong and who was weak.

But as they struggled for dominance, there was one teensy little problem. All the ways they measured power and importance had exactly nothing to do with Jesus. Power? He died on the cross. Importance? He held no rank or office, had no money or privilege. There was no collection at Golgotha. As he died, he had only as many followers stay with him as you could count on one hand. By every standard and every metric of human success, Jesus was a failure. That failure was a stumbling block to the Jews of his day, and foolishness to Gentiles. They just couldn’t grasp it. How could this be what God wants? How could this selfless sacrifice be what God wants, and who God is?

So if this is what God considers success, how in the world are you supposed to measure it? The basic answer is...you're not. What you and I consider success, our metrics...these aren't what matters. It isn't our task to measure. It is God's.