WE BROKE 1,000. DOES IT EVEN MATTER?
It's hard to believe.Eight years ago, having a thousand people worshiping together in a single weekend in this church seemed impossible.The first time I visited here, the bulletin had "141" recorded as the attendance the weekend before. I believe the average was about 200. Last weekend, we had 1,005.Does it matter? Does God care about counting the numbers we have in church? Does he rejoice when it's a big number?It’s hard to deny that God is into large crowds. Even in the Old Testament we read of great crowds gathering to worship Yahweh as a very good thing. The prophet Daniel told his countrymen that in the end times, God’s people would gather in innumerable multitudes. Revelation 5 speaks of our gathering for worship as being “myriads upon myriads, ten thousand times ten thousand.” I don’t even know what a myriad is, but I’ll bet it's a lot of people.It seems to me that God wants crowds gathering to worship Him.He sent His Son to die for the whole world (a pretty big number) and He did that to have a big family. That’s why Jesus told us to go into the highways and hedges to bring even strangers in. That’s why He gave his marching orders to go into all the world to make disciples. He wants a big family! Do we want what God wants?The story of the early church in the Book of Acts is a recounting of growth. We rejoice in Acts 2 when Luke reported that the church was launched with 3,000 converts and members. We rejoice a couple of chapters later when Luke reports 5,000 additional souls added to the church. As Luke continues in Acts, he repeatedly revisits that theme...the dramatic increase of numbers in the early church.It seems that numbers matter to God and he wants them to matter to us.Because every number is a name, a story, a person that God loves dearly.Our work here at The Bridge is not done yet. We are surrounded by hundreds of thousands of people who are still far from God, and he wants us to care about reaching them as well. So let's rejoice in the crowd we had last weekend. But let's work even harder at building that number in the months and years ahead.