Many church bodies cite the size of their roster of baptized members as an indication of their influence or relevance. This has always struck me as a meaningless metric in general, but I only recently realized how meaningless it is for real churches in the US.
As a micro-level example, consider Bethel Lutheran Church here in Madison. (The sample is both hopelessly small and biased; Andrea and I were members there until we left the ELCA in early 2008.1) Bethel is a large and old church with six pastors and five services every weekend. When we left, Bethel had approximately 6,100 baptized members. But the largeness of the building, staff, and roster were not apparent in the pews; in 2008, Bethel saw weekly attendance of around 1,200.
I don’t have any specialist knowledge about running churches. However, I do know something about building communities around projects and making things that people care about. I can’t imagine regarding a software project as a success if the vast majority of people who tried it relegated it to an unimportant or occasional role; likewise, I can’t conceive of an industry in which one might feel good about having a “customer base” that was, on average, a one-in-five shot to actually use one’s “product” at any given opportunity — or any possible way someone could honestly tout such a customer roster, including the 80% who chose some other product, as evidence of clout, thought leadership, or user engagement.
1 A full accounting of the story behind this move is another story for another day (and one I hope to tell eventually), but those of you who know me personally know that the move had been in the works for a long time and was in fact about ten years overdue.
