As churches attempt a move in a more missional direction one of the major issues involves rethinking church “measurables” or “scorecards.” David Fitch offers several good ideas on this topic in chapter one of The Great Giveaway. He contends that there is still a need to measure, but the things we “count” will be very different. When speaking on my favorite measurable Fitch writes:

Let us also turn from measuring the size of buildings to the number of new churches planted. Let us count the number of local congregations each church has formed outside itself instead of the attendance figures on Sunday morning or the increased size of the worship facility. We must ask, Why is it that pastors of large churches are more willing to build bigger buildings than empower a group of forty to fifty people to plant another living body of Christ? If indeed the facts are true that the greatest conversion growth occurs in churches when they grow from fifty to two hundred people, why is it that we insist on building bigger churches after they reached one thousand?

What does it say about our assumptions for church growth when we plant churches that already start with two hundred people? Does it say that a church is not really a “successful” church until it reaches a thousand? But if we accept our new conditions in a post-Christian culture, pastoral success and the success of a church will not be measured by simple numbers alone, but by church plants, the spurring on of missional congregations that can display a witness visibly to the new life in Christ before a watching and lost world.

If what we have said above is true, evangelicals should seek a vision of the world that is populated with local bodies of Christ, not megachurch centers. Instead of huge religious arenas for private individuals to come eat, shop, and see a religious production, let us evangelicals pursue a world where one can no sooner go to a Starbucks, a Cineplex movie theater, or a local tavern without also being confronted with an alternative center for life, a life centered under the lordship of Christ, the visible local body of Christ. If this is what it means to be a physical body of Christ in North America, then the ultimate sign of church success will be “the number of churches you have planted,” not how big your church is in terms of attendance, decisions, or church facilities.