Guest Columnist: One Little, Two Little, Three Little….

Stacey L. Hanson

Counting heads? Have you ever wondered how many dollars are spent by United Methodists to count heads? In my church a dozen staff members and volunteers each spend a little more than an hour every Monday consolidating data from attendance pads, Sunday school rosters, UMY sign in sheets, and Bible study rolls. That info is then entered into our database which is maintained by one full time staff member. Towards the end of the year (right about now) the database is cajoled into spitting out various numbers for charge conference reports and end of the year reports which are printed and published locally and elsewhere.

If the dollar value of the costs for collecting, recording, reporting, and publishing weekly headcount information could be accurately estimated, I suspect we would be surprised. I was when I did so for my local church (12K+ annually). But the dollars spent shouldn’t be the biggest surprise to us. Relative to the cost, it’s the little value that all that head counting adds to our mission that should. That’s not to say that accountability and measuring successes are valueless exercises. They are in fact the first principles for moving a church from being good to being great as Jim Collins notes in his book “Good to Great and the Social Sectors: A Monograph to Accompany Good to Great.”

But it is to say, or rather to ask, “What does head counting truly measure?” Is it effectiveness, popularity, commitment, discipleship? Possibly, but more data would be needed to prove these. Absent that further data, headcounts simply measure participation: that is “showing up”. And I don’t suspect that merely showing up (even more and more showing up) will move a church from good to great. I think we need to measure something else all together – progress. Measuring an individual’s progress through stages of discipleship would, in my opinion, provide us a much better indicator of our success at making disciples. Our head counting would then tell us how many of our people have entered into stage one, how many have left stage one for stage two, stage two for three and so on. This of course would force us to come up with a common definition of discipleship, a common process for making disciples, and name common stages of progress in that process. But don’t worry, we’ve done it before. Remember the subtle shift in Luke’s language calling the twelve “disciples” prior to their commission (The Gospel According to Luke) and “apostles” thereafter (Acts of the Apostles). He was marking their progress in the process.

Remember that the hallmark doctrine of early Methodism was Entire Sanctification (Christian Perfection) which expected a believer to progress in personal and social holiness throughout a lifetime by cooperating with God’s grace and employing various “methods.” Progress in a process was the standard. Of course such a focused effort to re-defining our present standards would amount to a new model of local church discipleship. I’ll save that one for a future column. But for now, the above examples can both encourage us to consider the hard work of defining and naming stages in discipleship as well as suggest to us how we might do so. And, until we do all the money spent on head counting will count for very little.

The Rev. Stacey L. Hanson is the Associate Minister: GROW at the Roswell UMC.