This post was previously written by Steve Pike on April 10th. Since Steve is out of town, we will be revisiting some classic posts and updating previous church planter stories over the next couple of weeks.

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In the interest of full disclosure and to be fair, this happened nearly thirty years ago, so I’m telling the story to make a point, not because I believe this is a wide spread practice. However, it does illustrate, in the extreme, what I believe might be a core measuring problem that is “dumbing down” our missional aptitude.

I once heard the pastor of a church advertising on the radio that he would actually live on the roof of his church until the number of people attending one of his worship services exceeded 1000 people. I’m not making this up. He was serious and he made quite a spectacle of himself. The newspaper picked up the story and he got a lot of free publicity. And if I remember correctly, he did end up with over 1000 people seated in a room listening to him preach.

This story is a dramatic illustration of what I believe is a core problem with our approach to starting new churches. We measure the wrong stuff. Let’s think about the story of the preacher on the roof for just a minute, by asking a few analytical questions. After all his efforts, what did he end up with? Who would be attracted by this type of gimmickry? What would be the reaction of the typical unchurched person to an invitation that went something like, “Please come to my church so my pastor can stop living on the roof!” ? What about the 25,000 other people living in the community? Why just live on the roof until 1000 came to church? Why not stay up there until everyone showed up? If all we are trying to do is get people to sit down and listen to a preacher preach, then I guess he succeeded. But a healthy church engaged in healthy spiritual formation is interested in way more significant outcomes than just getting people into pews.

Measuring our progress by how many people sit in a room together on Sunday creates all sorts of dysfunctional behavior that might account for our lack of missional progress. The perceived self worth of church leaders jumps up and down like a barometer in Missouri based on the most current attendance figures. Ministerial gatherings are marred with a competitive undertone of comparison based on one main measuring stick…”How many you runnin’?” What does the number of people “attending” really indicate anyway? Is it really possible that God intended His Prevailing Church to be measured by how many people are attending meetings?

Measuring progress by the number of bodies in room is especially dangerous for new churches. Many new church planters are encouraged to hurry up and get their “services” going so. Why? What’s the rush? It might be because the only way we know how to measure progress is how many people are in the room. But our research on healthy church starts reveals that one of the factors that contributes to anemic churches is that they are born prematurely. Just like preemie babies, churches born before their time often struggle with health challenges all through life.

Well then, how DO we measure progress in a new missional church plant before and after the “birth?” Good question. That will be the subject of our next installment in this series.