In our American culture, we tend to correspond something's successfulness to how high of numbers go with it. The “best movie” in theater will be the showing with the most “box office” revenue, or the song with the most sales each week is the current “top of the charts” hit. Because of this habit, we sometimes will relay that method of measuring success over to other areas that it doesn't belong; one of those places this problem exists is with churches. How often do we make the mistake of viewing the number of attendees on Sunday morning as a rating of how “successful” a certain church is?
Just the same, I applied this mistake of rating to how successful my blogs were. I got frustrated when I compared the number of viewers I had to some of the others on my team's blogs. One member has more then ten times the viewers I have, and after I had saw that, I lost my drive to blog. I still knew I needed to write some, and had great ideas for some blogs, but I just didn't have the invigoration to do so. I realized how faulty this thinking was recently, and it reminded me of something I had thought about last month.
My main ministry I did in July in Romania was with a man named Daniel. Daniel had me doing different tasks of labor with him, such as mopping up from a drain that had clogged and overflowed the room with the worst smelling water in the world, or taking a very large pile of wood and organizing it. These tasks were important, but the job that I got to do that moved me the most was visitation to Daniel's church. Daniel was the pastor of a church of about eight members. Yes that is correct: eight members was a full house for him. On Sundays I would drive him and I (I was the one driving; it was very interesting getting to drive in a country like Romania) to his church in Coteana, where he would have a service for about two hours. Daniel wanted World Racers there so that we could give testimonies, preach, and interact with those who attended.
I remember when Daniel first told me we were going to his church and me thinking, “Oh, it's going to be a large building with maybe about fifty people who will attend”. Then we arrived, and my expectations were crumbled: it was a small house, and in attendance that day were three aged women, an aged man, a father and two of his young kids, and Daniel's wife. While sitting in the service that day, God spoke to me about how erroneous we are when we, such as places like America, sometimes think of places like these to be “lesser” churches then those “mega”-churches with two thousand in attendance every Sunday.
The number of members a church has does not determine how successful it is, but the the Bible measures a church’s maturity by the measure by which all God’s people are being equipped to serve, and are actually serving to make Jesus their shared treasure as a church, and whether he is filling everything in their lives (Ephesians 4:11-16). I realized recently that the same applies to my blogging: it is not the amount of views my blog gets that determines whether it is successful, but that it makes a difference to that someone God has prepared for Him to teach something to them through my blogs. Keeping this in mind, I have the drive to write with purpose. I apologize for my lack of blogging, and promise to be more intentional about writing a good number each month.
