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One result of business thinking is our tendency to value large churches over small churches, big events over small, and so on. What role should quantitative measurement play in church life?

Primarily as vital signs. When I was a pastor I kept careful track of the statistics—financial, attendance, and various other things. The issue is what it is that you're quantifying and why. If we're going to quantify church attendance or membership, for example, we probably ought to also look at such things as how many small groups we have and what's happening in them, how many people are involved in various kinds of ministries.

Quantification can be carried out on a broader scale so that it looks more like the kingdom of God and less like an entrepreneurial business.

First, make sure that quantification covers as broad a range as the reality of the church. Second, realize that the most important things can't be quantified, and so we always have to take numbers as signs of something more fundamental.

Your book bears two key marks of evangelical religion: You make the Bible the primary focus of how to think about the church, and you keep asking us to learn from past renewal movements. Why have evangelical churches not understood themselves more biblically? And why haven't they learned the lessons of renewal as they should have?

Whether it's evangelical or not, the church is a social organization. Over time, it tends to become self-serving. It tends to lose its focus, its dynamic, and so on. The same hardening of the arteries that happens in other organizations happens in the church. In the church it becomes more pernicious because we have a tendency to say this is the church and, therefore, we must be doing it right. We sacralize the structures. That's why I make the wine and wineskins distinction.

Also, evangelical theology has been so focused soteriologically that it hasn't done enough work ecclesiologically. This ties in with individualism and with the nature of what we inherited from Luther.

Unfortunately, there is a not very deep understanding of renewal movements. With regard to renewal movements, we go one of two directions. One is the revivalist mentality, which dissolves everything into the need for revival. This ends up being a dead end because the question is What do you do after the revival?

You schedule another visit from a revivalist in twelve months.

Right. That puts you into an annual peak-and-valley thing rather than ongoing organic vitality in the life of the church.

We either do that or we forget about the renewal perspective. These two sides are typified in the 19th-century debates over the Finney revivals and what followed. "We don't want any of that. We tried that. Just forget the whole renewal perspective and focus on doctrine."

I try to maintain a kind of creative dynamic interaction between those two perspectives and say it's not as simplistic as the revivalist mentality, but there is something about the way God periodically renews the church, and we can learn about that, and we can cooperate with that, and it can enrich our ecclesiology.

Copyright © 2002 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.

Decoding the Church: Mapping the DNA of Christ's Body , by Howard A Snyder with Daniel V. Runyon, is this month's selection for the Christianity Today Editor's Bookshelf. Elsewhere on our site, you can:

• Buy the book online
  
  
• Read our extended review by Christianity Today Editor David Neff
  
  
• Read our extended interview with author Howard Snyder
  
  
• Read excerpts from Decoding the Church
  
  

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November (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46