Libido Numerandi

In his masterpiece The City of God, St. Augustine uses the term libido dominandi, which might be translated as “the lust for domination.” It is Augustine’s term for fallen man’s inclination to lord over others, to play God by seeking to control other people.

There is a variation of this libido that seeks power and the praise of men by an appeal to numbers: libido numerandi. Even animals turn to this form of self-aggrandizement in making themselves look big - often as a defense mechanism to frighten away predators, or as an appeal to a potential mate. But especially among fallen men, there is a determination to dominate others by an assertion of self-promotion: be it physical size, strength, influence, wealth, or the number of people in one’s organization.

This libido numerandi is everywhere. Companies will routinely boast in their advertisements that they are the world’s largest this or that, the biggest such and such a firm in the country, or the Number One seller of widgets in the state.

And this libido is all too common in the church. It is the main lust displayed by the Church Growth Movement (CGM), and has become justification for a lot of mischief - even abolishing the Mass and the usual public ceremonies, like the order of the readings, vestments, etc. - all in the name of boosting numbers.

Of course, we are called upon to evangelize, but we are also called upon to seek and save even the single lost sheep, and not just make a play for ever larger numbers of people for the sake of numbers itself. In our Lord’s parable, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine on the plain to find one of his flock that isn’t even a new “recruit,” but rather a member who has wondered off. This legacy maintenance approach to ministry must seem a strange strategy indeed to the CGM advocate, who would likely rather be leaving one behind to look for ninety-nine new members, not to mention the vault of heaven resounding over a mere net gain of only one member!

And this is part of the curse of the Church Growth Movement - people just become numbers, tallies on a spreadsheet, abstract targeted goals in a corporate jargon-filled mission statement. The now (thank God) defunct Ablaze!™ program, that was sold not a program but as a “movement”, created such a dehumanizing secular marketing approach by laying out a numerical goal of a hundred million “critical events” to be racked up (defined as telling people about Jesus, but not defined as actually baptizing someone). It was pure libido numerandi. It downplayed the means of grace, it reduced people and human interactions to the place of tick marks in a database and a number to be reported by the suits at meetings, and completely forgot about the Holy Spirit and the Doctrine of Election.

How different than our Lord’s Parable of the Sower, in which the seed is cast far and wide in a way that looks foolish to the world, unconcerned with numbers, and not reporting them to a website or to the bureaucrats in the home office. And the sower doesn’t research to find out the best place to cast. He doesn’t use the techniques of modern agribusiness to bump up the fertility of the soil. He doesn’t employ genetic modification to make his seeds more “effective.” He doesn’t even use the latest and greatest technology. He just tosses the seed everywhere, seemingly recklessly, and he just leaves the results up to God the Holy Spirit. The sower’s job is to be faithful.

And that is another thing that the lust for numbers ignores. Which church is more “successful”? Is it Joel Osteen’s stadium full of tens of thousands, or is it the little LCMS congregation that uses the liturgy, the hymns, and is normed by the Bible and the Confessions and has maybe a couple dozen people in attendance? Is the metric for success, for a “healthy church” (in CGM lingo) based on the number of people present, or the degree of fidelity to the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ?

One rank example of the libido numerandi was when a previous district president said that he hoped my congregation would grow to 900 members in a year. How he came up with that number is a mystery. Maybe it was a subconscious reference to Oral Roberts’s 900 foot Jesus. Our building holds a couple hundred. Why would we want to be that large? Why wouldn’t it make more sense to have another congregation or two (or more) - providing responsible pastoral care - if there were that many members? And why not focus on the kind of growth that sees our members grow in the maturity of their faith, in their Christian life, in their sanctification, in their knowledge of the Bible and the confessions of the church? In their love for the liturgy and their children’s growing up immersed in the means of grace? Why is success seen merely as numerical growth?

Another example is when pastors (and not just pastors) get together, one of the first questions is “How big is your church?” Or the really revealing way in which this question is often put: “How many do you worship?” If that isn’t not only libido numerandi, but outright idolatry, then nothing is! The object of our worship is the Most Holy Trinity, not the number of people in the pews.

There was even a well-known pastor who would get into discussions online about theological matters. You could tell when he was losing the argument, because he would look up his opponent’s congregation’s statistics (which are, inexplicably, published online) and then berate him if his church had a net loss of members over the past year or over the pastor’s tenure at that congregation - as if that had any validity as a theological argument. Well, according to libido numerandi, it makes perfect sense.

There is that nasty little libido in all of us to lord over others by an appeal to our own perceived greatness. And in our culture, size matters.

It calls to mind when David’s census did not go well, and God punished his libido numerandi: “Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel…. But God was displeased with this thing, and He struck Israel…. So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel, and 70,000 men of Israel fell” (1 Chron 21:1,7, 14). It also calls to mind the account of Gideon’s conquest of Midian with only 300 men. God deliberately shrunk Gideon’s army so as to conquer their libido numerandi: “The Lord said to Gideon, ‘The people with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over Me, saying, my own hand has saved me’“ (Jud 7:2).

But according to the Word of God, the Spirit blows where He wishes. The Church expands, the Church contracts, and in the long run, the Church will drastically shrink. Jesus Himself said so. There is not a direct relation between faithfulness and size, and to the contrary, when one lives in a hostile culture, there may well even be an inverse relationship. This is not to say that we should strive to make our churches small, or denigrate those whose churches are growing. These things are typically beyond our control. Contrary to the premises of the CGM, numerical growth is often related much more to the secular demographic increase or decrease of a local population than anything we do.

And that is also a temptation to the Church Growthers.

Many years ago, I received a beg letter from a proposed church plant. In making the pitch, it appealed to the fact that the target subdivision demographic was suburban, well-to-do, and comprised of many young families. The implication is that your money won’t go to waste, because there is a better chance of success among people with money and kids. So the older people, the less-fortunate, and other outcasts who are not as likely to be an attractive demographic for investment can just do without evangelism, I suppose. The sower went looking for good soil, and limited his planting there, it seems. Should we assume that God blesses such an approach to evangelism?

Bishop Vsevolod Lytkin commented on the monetary inefficiencies of mission work - especially in his milieu of the vast terrain of the Lutheran diaspora in Siberia:

Speaking pragmatically, mission work always brings financial losses for the church, but we do not go to collect offerings. We go to proclaim the Word.

The worldly considerations and calculations of gains and losses, financial, or in terms of numerical bragging rights, do not enter the picture in evangelism that is done out of love for the lost. If we were to spend a million dollars and not one member joins the congregation, it is not for us to call it a success or a failure. The Word of God does not return empty. “We go to proclaim the Word.” - and to do so faithfully. The rest is up to God. Our boast is not in “how many we worship” or the balance sheet of our latest building project. Our boast is in Christ our Lord.

We must strive to replace our lust with love. And true love is not concerned with such details as numbers, personal vainglory, prestige, or impressiveness in the eyes of the world.