Numbers Nazarenes

Recently I spent my Memorial Day sitting in a tabernacle full of Nazarene pastors and lay people.
Once a year we gather together at a camp ground for what we call our District Assembly... which for us represents half of Tennessee and all of Mississippi. Aka, lots of churches.

It's hard for us to believe, but these sorts of gatherings were originally created out of a movement. The Church of the Nazarene was a movement birthed out of a group of people caring for the poor and proclaiming the kingdom of heaven. Ironically though, when in an effort to preserve what a movement is about, overtime, movements can become stagnant institutions that are more interested in freezing history rather than ... making it.

Fast forward 100 years, we come to these District Assembly's and just about everything we do is summed up with no words at all, but with Numbers.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5 - that's all we need to know.

We sit down, open the packet in our seat, flip through the list of churches. Nothing is listed under each name except numbers. Nothing. Just numbers.

How are we doing as a District? Let's check our pulse... It's time for the Finance Committee report.

How is our Camp Ground doing? Let's see the budget.

How is our University doing? How many students are we bringing in?

More numbers please.


What if,

Numbers are what you report... when the movement is over.
Numbers have always been the world's way of showing how successful it is.
Numbers are how we try to Prop up our systems and declare "see Lord how good we are."

What if the kingdom doesn't grow by numbers?
What if the very moment we began attempting to count souls, we missed it?

The very moment that heaven became a destination instead of what makes up this Present moment... that's when we replaced Movement for Numbers.

What if Jesus has no interest in your numbers?
What if making disciples of all nations was never a numbers game?
But in order to feel successful we had to make it that.

If we truly embraced the lifestyle that Jesus came to teach us we would've never thought about numbers in the first place. Could it be any more obvious that the path Jesus came to teach us, that The Way, in which we received wasn't a hierarchical religious structure... but only a Cross.

It is only by the path of descent into Death, that the church will be able to find life.
It is not in the wilderness that the Church must embrace going, but into the tomb.
Because only when we have died may we be Resurrected!

Only when we are willing to loose all the numbers,
To stop playing the game of propping ourselves up and "measuring success"
To truly die to the system that attributes the Kingdom of Heaven with a scorecard...

Only then will we return to the movement that which is the Kingdom of Heaven
Only then will we remember why we were first called Nazarenes.