what is success...

The average church size in the United States is 90 people.

-The Barna Group

Think about that for a minute. 90 people. The Edge is 5 times that. MBC as a whole is more than 100 times that.

I think we sometimes have a tendancy to take for granted what God is doing at The Edge and McLean Bible Church. We forget that most churches would be blown away to have 400 people come one week, let alone every week.

The temptation when you start getting big can be to measure success in terms of numbers. An event wasn’t a success because it only had 200 people instead of 400. Or it was a success because there were 1000 people there.

But success is more than numbers. Success is more personal than that. God isn’t impressed just because we had 500 people at an Edge service or 2000 people at a 9:00 Tysons campus service. He’s impressed by life change and devotion to Him. Success is about individual people. God is more impressed by a church of 90 people totally devoted to Him than He is by 10,000 who are just meeting together for fun on a Sunday morning.

(As a disclaimer, that’s not a slam on “big church”. I know there are many totally devoted people there).

So how do you measure success of The Edge? Is it measured in good music and fun lights? Or is it in the hearts of the people there?