SOP: "Praise the Lord for the [insert number here] souls that were saved today!"
Just drove by a country church today where the sign out front said: “VBS — 17 souls saved!”
An old friend of mine used to call it “Scoreboard Evangelism”.
"Some things are of that nature as to make one's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache." John Bunyan
Why don’t people just focus on how many people got to hear a clear, accurate Gospel message?
For example:
- “VBS - Preached the Gospel to ** children! Praise the Lord!”
Tyler is a pastor in Olympia, WA and works in State government.
Why don’t people just focus on how many people got to hear a clear, accurate Gospel message?
Do you see any evidence of this in the Bible? What is the biblical pattern of using numbers for salvation?
[Larry]Would the 3000 in Acts 2:41 and the 5000 in Acts 4:4 comprise a pattern? Then you also have the 144,000 in Revelation 7:4.Why don’t people just focus on how many people got to hear a clear, accurate Gospel message?
Do you see any evidence of this in the Bible? What is the biblical pattern of using numbers for salvation?
My hypothesis … there’s really less “counting” in Acts than one might think:
You have:
- “And in those days Peter stood up in the midst of the disciples (altogether thenumber of names was about a hundred and twenty)” (Here counted committed disciples!) (Acts 1:15)
- “Then those who gladly received his word were baptized; and that day about three thousand souls were added to them” (Acts 2:41). (Here counted the ones who responded to the message AND were baptized AND joined the church)
- “However, many of those who heard the word believed; and the number of the men (ἀνήρ = “male men”) came to be about five thousand.” (Acts 4:4). (Men were counted. Not women and children)
After than in Acts … generalizations:
- Acts 6:1, “Now in those days, when the number of the disciples was multiplying”
- Acts 6:7, “Then the word of God spread, and the number of the disciples multiplied greatly in Jerusalem, and a great many of the priests were obedient to the faith” (Comment: What I would like to know .. how many priests? Out of how many total priests? Wish they had Excel back then! And inserted charts and graphs in the autograph!)
- Acts 11:21, “And the hand of the Lord was with them, and a great number believed and turned to the Lord.”
- Acts 16:5, “So the churches were strengthened in the faith, and increased in number daily.”
Personally I love metrics … such as “How much will this cost?”; “How much was saved by …”; “What is this investment return?”; “What is the budget?”; “What were the actual expenditures vs the budget”; “How many attended?”. Et cetera.
That being said, I think that counting the number of children saved in VBS is folly. A compromise would be “X children indicated professions of faith”
A year from now? Five years? Ten years? If there is no follow through (and there never was when I was in VBS years ago - as a leader) I would venture to say not very many. Those that are are likely children of leaders. People, children especially, love to follow the crowd, and really have no idea what they just agreed to.
Discussion