August 28, 2008
Taking a Congregation's Pulse
There are still a few older congregations around who maintain the wooden announcement boards that hang in the foyer or the sanctuary. Each week the board reports the prior week’s worship attendance, offering and Sunday School attendance. I love those boards. Reading the vital statistics of a church is like looking at the medical chart of a patient. I think you begin to feel the pulse of a congregation when you see their attendance and their offerings. Many churches began abandoning the public display of statistics in favor of putting such information in the weekly bulletin. It wasn’t long before the information was removed from the bulletin and lumped together in the monthly newsletter. Some churches have now quit reporting statistics all together and apparently congregations don’t mind. I guess if your attendance is in the thousands and the offering in the hundreds of thousands it could be hard to take a pulse…and it would take a really big board.
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1 comment:
Gail;
----Still hung up on the announcement board? There are thousands of people out there dying every day, most of them are going to miss the privilege of spending eternity with Jesus! So we are not going to spend our time discussing the announcement board, again.
-----I learned to speak Betelgeuse at a church I attended a few short years ago, so let me translate my first paragraph into straight-forward English:
------YOU AREN’T FOLLOWING THE LEADERS YET? They need to attract a lot of young professionals into church; forget where their money’ll go! So we can not have church feeling like it used to feel, a narrow way of only a few travelers. Shut up about that old stuff and help us make it seem like Broadway, comfortable and pleasing for money -uh-hmm-uh- many.
-----Truly, I jest, kind of. There are many good and sincere leaders of the churches of the new way. The fact that there are many who are in it for themselves is sort of matched by the fact that there always have been many leaders in the church of any age just serving themselves. But good for you, Gail, for standing up for the meaning that these leaders, good and bad, try to take away from others.
Love,
Steve Corey
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