How do you measure the size of a church? As Baptists, we tend to count the number of people in formal or covenanted Membership, plus or minus those we have on the associate or non-active lists, who we may or may not retain as full Members for pastoral reasons (and who we may or may not count in the census data used for per capita subscriptions, fees and licences). Then there are the Friends or Non-Members who are regular in attendance and active in service, who never get included in subs/fees/etc calculations and who may or may not ever choose to Covenant formally with a congregation for all sorts of reasons. Lastly there are the under 18s... young people, teenagers, children, babes in arms.
Today, one of my tasks has been updating and consolidating the lists held by Railway Town Baptist Church.
By the time I leave at the end of August, we will have welcomed 5 (possibly 6) people into Covenanted Membership. During the same time, two have died, and one has withdrawn from membership, suggesting a net gain of 2 or 3... or, growth of around 10%, based on the 'active list'. (I've excluded myself from those numbers, as I am a 'net zero')
When we closed our Sunday School, we were down to 'maximum of two, and sometimes no' children. Since we began our new model, we have anything up to a dozen, rarely less than six, and with fifteen names on the role... or growth by a factor of around 7 (or around 600% more than we started with).
Our Non-Active (mostly elderly and housebound) and Friends lists add as many again as the Active and Children's lists... if everyone arrived at once (which won't happen) we would be nearly 80; Sunday-by-Sunday we are around 40-50, which moves us to the 'large' end of 'small' churches.
As I reflect on almost three years, I feel that we have, together, done a good work, that from small-small we are, at last practically speaking, large-small, with a lower average age, greater demographic diversity and new faces emerging among those who take on leadership roles. It's not about numbers, it's never about numbers - but even so, the numbers are encouraging (and the spreadsheet is complete!)