How Playing The Church Numbers Game Works
The Numbers Tell A Different Story
When people push back on the idea that the Church didn’t attend services in the Scripture—it gathered around ordinary tables, they rarely argue theology.
Why? Because they can’t. The modern understanding of church, discipleship, and leadership is found nowhere in the Bible.
So instead, we argue numbers. I did.
Look how many professions of faith.
Look how many people were baptised.
Look how many students were at the leadership conference.
So it helps to slow down and ask a simple question: Do numbers prove God’s approval—or just God’s mercy?
If numbers equal endorsement, then God must be wildly enthusiastic about prisons, terminal cancer wards, and overdose funerals. After all, many people “find God” in those places.
But no one would say God endorses incarceration, disease, or addiction.
What’s happening is simpler—and far more gracious: God meets people inside human desperation. That doesn’t mean He designed it, approved it, or wants us to build systems around it.
If that idea feels uncomfortable, welcome to the Old Testament.
Six hundred-plus laws.
A massive temple system.
Endless rituals and sacrifices.
All of it was God meeting people where they were in their delusional idea of Him—not endorsing where they thought He lived. In short: God moves because He is faithful, not because what we’re doing is right.
Which brings us to what we’ve labeled “church”—and to a couple questions that were deeply uncomfortable for me when I was pastoring one.
Is your church doing what Jesus did?
Because Jesus didn’t build a stage.
He didn’t offer weekly services.
He didn’t preach sermons.
He didn't host leadership conferences.
Those are Roman ideas—borrowed from empire, organization, and control—not from Jesus.
Is your church saying what Jesus said?
Because Jesus didn’t preach a distant God who must be appeased.
He didn’t preach sin as rule-breaking that threatens God’s holiness.
He didn’t preach acceptance once the right conditions were met.
Much of what we call “the gospel” today was shaped by Greek philosophy long after Jesus—a mythical version of Christianity that lets people keep control while calling it “faithfulness.”
Why does this happen?
Philosophically, false ideas about God breed insecurity in people. Insecurity breeds anxious ambition. And anxious ambition creates leaders and members that quietly feed off one another just to feel like they’re enough.
Practically, God’s unconditional, inexhaustible grace doesn’t sell to a world in love with doing. And that’s a real problem for a self-sustaining institution that needs popularity to survive.
By contrast, the Church Jesus started was not an organized institution with systems and hierarchies. It was a way of life—built on trust, friendship, and the risky freedom that faith was meant to bring.
Real faith isn’t striving to be like Jesus. It’s trusting in who Jesus already is for us. And tht kind of trust is terrifying to systems built on control.
So formalized churches offer safer substitutes. Decisions. Programs. Metrics.
People make “salvation decisions” for a god who doesn’t exist—the god of transaction, leverage, and religious performance. And these systems grow precisely because they reward our deepest addiction: self-justification.
As a result, many churches are:
Loved by people who don’t see the God Jesus revealed
Fueled by people who want religion to validate them
Irrelevant to the world the Church actually exists for
And that matters.
Today, over 80% of society has no interest in what’s been labeled “church.” And it’s not because they hate Jesus—it’s because they don’t recognize Him there.
Here’s the uncomfortable irony:
Churches in the U.S. receive over $30 billion in donations each year. We have more buildings, more staff, and more programming than ever before. And yet belief in Jesus has been in steady decline—year after year after year after year.
Which leaves us with a question worth sitting in:
What if all that time, money, and energy were spent the way Jesus spent His life—around unbranded tables, with ordinary people, telling the gracious truth about God, trusting Him to bear fruit, and helping those in need?
Because Jesus didn’t create—or call for—what we see in the name of “church.”
He asked us to go be the friends who pass on grace without religion. To baptize those who believe. And to teach them to treasure what He revealed (Matt. 28:19–20).
That’s why Jesus did it at the table—because that’s where this way of life actually happens. It doesn’t require money; it frees people to use theirs to empower movement, spread hope, and meet real needs.
That’s why Lark isn’t trying to fix the church machine. We’re simply getting back to what Jesus started: friends, tables, grace, and freedom—no stage required.
If that sounds like life, start here.