Obsessions and their bondage...

One of the obsessions of the modern political arena is polling.  We poll and poll and poll until we think we know what people think they want us to think and then we poll some more.  Our politicians and candidates for office cannot pick out a tie or comb their hair without polling data to see how people might respond.  It is a paralysis that threatens the very vitality of the American system of government.  We elect people who we think will listen to us and they poll us to see if they are on the right side of things (the prevailing side) and then we complain because they do what we wanted and it was the wrong thing.  We tell candidates what we want them to think and complain that they are captive people when elected (captive to the folks who got them elected).  Honestly, if I could do one thing this silly season of electioneering I would ban all polls (or at least limit them to once a month).

As bad as this obsession is to the political process, it is even worse in the Church.  We are obsessed with any and all kinds of measurements of satisfaction and success.  We are always asking or being asked the old Ed Koch question, "How am I doing?"  I get emails asking for quarterly statistics on attendance, baptisms, new members received, adult confirmations, etc...  I do not know what happens to the information returned to those querrying the church about the state of the church.  I am not sure I want to know.  I turn in monthly reports to the Elders and Church Council (attendance, communions, pastoral acts, pastoral calls, sick and shut in visits, member contacts, miles driven, etc...).  They are looked over and promptly filed away or tossed out hardly ever to be referred to again.  At our weekly staff meetings we review how things went last Sunday, during the weekly events, and at special events in the life of the congregation (some evaluations more formal and others less, with some objective data and other perceptions unsubstantiated by fact).  Then there are those performance evaluations and their own stats, measurements, and meanings.  How fun is sitting down with a review board who will judge you and what you have done (with the outcome being more or less money)?  Of course the numbers we chart most seriously are the ones with dollar signs in front of them -- the ultimate poll numbers.  Are we taking money in, making expenses, is it rising, plateauing, or falling...

Sometimes I feel like the dieter who pulls out the scale every morning to see the bad news.  Is this really how we are supposed to do things as a Church?  It is not that I think we need to get rid of the numbers.  We need some of them.  What we need to ditch is our obsession, dare I say enslavement, to those numbers.  How much can one snapshot in time really say about the life of the Church?  The health of the Church?  Do we really want to be defined simply by prevailing trends (up or down)?  How do we factor in faithfulness?  How do we evaluate speaking truth that none of us wants to tell and even fewer want to hear?  How do we quantify or measure spiritual growth, maturity, increased holiness and righteousness?

Transforming Churches Network (or what other derivation of those initials is now being used) and many other revitalization programs are fueled by numbers, by measurements, by conclusions based upon those numbers.  Everything has to go except growth -- that is the one thing we are here for and we chart this growth by numbers of people contacted, by the perception of those in the community around us, by the attendance numbers, by the new folks (read that unchurched) folks brought it, and by the financial figures that mean success in every language.  So taking a dying congregation and make the terminally ill tell you how they are feeling and what they are doing about it as the clock ticks their life away... nothing sets people on fire for Jesus like statistics!

No, I think we need to deal with the addiction and wean ourselves off our obsession with naval gazing -- the constant and generally fruitless pursuit of what folks are thinking, what they like, how things are being received, and the statistics behind all of it.  What freedom we might encounter if we could just cast off the shackles (or chains, as Joe Biden might put it) of constant measurement and just do the work of the kingdom and be the Church of Christ. 

Oh, well, it was a nice thought, even if somewhat unrealistic....