While numbers are important in sharpening strategy and planning for growth, I think a preoccupation with numbers of evangelistic converts is essentially unhelpful. To extend the fishing metaphor, the push to increase the "number of times we go fishing" might well result in a whole lot of catfish, stingrays and sharks.
The Great Commandment is not a call to convert the heathen, nor even a call to "go" but a call to make disciples, "teaching them to obey everything that [Jesus has] commanded them." That will deliver quality growth that multiplies. And that's where the late-20th-century church has crashed and burned.
Rod Benson is a Baptist minister and ethicist who attends Dural Baptist Church.
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I commented a couple of months ago in a sermon, that we Baptists too often make believers, but not disciples...
What kind of believers? Those who assent to certain propositions, or those who trust the one who called them sufficiently to do what he says?
Our whole process of leading people to Christ, with its strong - and necessary - emphasis on facts means that we often fail to consider whether a person is comprehensively responding to the gospel, or only intellectually agreeing with what they heard. There is little attention to how the person feels about the gospel challenge. We have moved from one extreme to the other. Unless intellect, emotions and will are all engaged, it is unlikely that there will be a lasting conversion.
What kind of believers? Those who believe that, having shaken the preacher's hand, they are saved?
We have replaced the rejected rituals of the Catholics and Anglicans with our own evangelical rituals, and too often unconsciously led people to believe that undergoing those rituals will be sufficient to gain God's favour.
Incidentally, this is my main objection to what the Pentecostals are currently doing: falling over has become their ritual.
I think that George Fox had a good point when he told those who were convinced that they should sit down under Christ, their Teacher, and learn from him.
People may respond initially for all kinds of reasons and in all sorts of ways, but, unless they move on, they may never truly be converted.
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