For good or ill, I’m something of a quote freak; I like things said with some zing and a point on the end, and when I run across something that’s truly well put, I like to hang on to it. Over the years, I’ve built up a rather eclectic collection of favorites. I truly appreciate, for example, the wise counsel of the great pitcher Satchel Paige: “Don’t look back—something might be gaining on you.” Then there’s the Hall of Fame catcher Yogi Berra, who stressed the importance of community thus: “If you don’t go to somebody’s funeral, they won’t go to yours.” Lately, as things grow somewhat thin on the back of my head, I’m especially grateful for the Roman writer Seneca, who once observed, “I don’t consider myself bald, I’m just taller than my hair.”Amen.Of course, Seneca’s particularly quotable because he wasn’t just a great wit, he was also a formidable philosopher, and there’s considerable wisdom in his witticisms. He noted at one point, for instance, that one “who suffers before it is necessary suffers more than is necessary”—a point to which I can attest from frequent experience. He also declared, “A great fortune is a great slavery”—though I’m not sure how that fits with his statement that “a great mind becomes a great fortune.” His insight that “a well-governed appetite is the greater part of liberty” is one which our libertine society would do well to take to heart, along with his comment that “Modesty forbids what the law does not.” Of all his insights, however, the one I most value is this:
Our plans miscarry because they have no aim. When a man does not know what harbor he seeks, no wind is the right wind.
This, I think, is something which the church really needs to bear in mind. It’s inevitable and natural that the church should care about numbers—members, attendance, giving, volunteers—because they’re the only concrete information we have about how many people we’re reaching and how people are responding to what we’re doing. That is by no means all that matters about our work, because it doesn’t tell us whether people are growing as Christians or whether we’re doing what God wants us to do, but that doesn’t mean that this information is irrelevant, either. When you factor in that for most churches, the numbers represent our main practical limitation (we can’t do x because we don’t have enough people/money/volunteers to pull it off), obviously they’re going to take a lot of our attention.Where the problem comes in is when we focus on the numbers. As Christians, our focus should only and ever be on Jesus, and our primary goal should always be to be where he wants us to be and do what he wants us to do. Our aim should be to see Jesus and go where he is, and there to do what he’s doing. When (even for the best of motives) we come to focus instead on adding people, or raising more money, or developing more volunteers and leaders, we lose sight of our goal, our plans have no true aim, and we fix our eyes on the means: whatever works to improve the numbers. When we start to think that way, then we begin to seek any harbor that promises to give us more people and more money; and as Seneca said, when we reach that state, no wind is the right wind.