Stop counting

How we all love playing the numbers game!

Like: the New York Times’s “19 songs that matter right now” (describing how top singers got us through the pandemic year.)

Nowadays, simple facts seem less acceptable. They have to be assembled in some commonly acceptable order, priority list, or measurement of supremacy.

We can’t even relax with music without inviting Alexa to play the Top Ten.

We can’t watch football without a spirited exchange on likely MVPs (Most Valuable Players). We have to give out a prize for the Player of the Week, or Best of the Year.

Sometimes it’s nothing more than Five Things to do this Weekend. Or rather, with me, Fifteen Things I won’t get to do this weekend.

And you just have to smile as you consider “11 Books that will actually make you excited to clean your house!” (Yes, a real news headline.)

But there’s a serious side to this. There are times when numbers clarify our thinking on a complex issue and work wonders for our memory.

American financier and philanthropist Ed Hajim, who rose from dire childhood circumstances to achieve professional success and personal fulfillment, didn’t hesitate to use numbers in a TV interview to share his belief in four main—carefully tabulated—pursuits:

1) Understand your Passions

2) Establish firm working Principles

3) Negotiate with honest Partners

4) Make realistic Plans.

Those P’s are easy to remember and clearly worthy of consideration.

And in March the editor of the Christian Century, Peter Marty, used numbers to clarify his predictions for the post-pandemic church. It won’t look the same, he suggested, but there’s potential for renewal.

       The six ideas he put forward included his belief that the social and spiritual capital connected with congregational life would be increasingly valuable, although he conceded that a church’s ministry would need to be spirited and compelling— especially if it was to compete with the convenience of worship at home in pajamas!

Marty observed that worship during the pandemic had taught us that churches can be liberated from a fixation on counting. Faith at its center is a transcendent mystery that refuses to be measured. Numbers depersonalize. There’s refreshing new freedom to be found in leaving religious bean-counting behind.

Marty also pointed out that the ability to conduct worthwhile ministry online throughout the pandemic had upended some of people’s obsessiveness over church buildings. Yet he had seen scores of people moved to tears simply when re-entering sacred spaces that had shaped their spiritual and emotional being.

The gathered church becomes an ever more precious entity, said Marty. Thirst will increase for authentic community where moral formation and relationships of meaning can prosper.

Our extended experience with virtual church, Marty added, may allow us to appreciate our buildings as hubs for mission without idolizing them—a healthy reset, despite the outsize work ahead for pastors in an age of conspiracy and disinformation.

More than ever, perhaps, churches will be committed to speaking the truth, displaying constancy, addressing paranoia, de­nouncing cults, and elevating the gospel above every nefarious claim that demonizes others or sows chaos.

Marty concluded that intimacy, proximity, and personal presence will carry more genuine authority in a post-pandemic church than touting a large platform.

“The creative joy of face-to-face conversation will be to get as many people around the table as possible thinking spiritually, confessionally, and enthusiastically about what the prophets and Jesus offer us in the journey of humility and reckoning.”

       And that conclusion would soar into my Top Ten!