Too often followers of Jesus get caught up with the size of their church building, the amount of funds in their bank account and/or the number of people attending Sunday morning services.

While these are all nice and easy ways of measuring a local church, are they the metrics we really want to be measuring?

Is having a lot of people in service on Sunday morning really a measurement of the Kingdom of God? Is having a large raining day fund or a huge church budget what Jesus died for?

Buildings are nice (they keep you warm in the winter and dry in the rain)…but should we really be rating a church by the building they meet in?

Jesus commissioned each person following Him to pray/heal the sick, raise the dead, feed the poor, love the unlovable, walk in the presence of the Father, cast out demons, proclaim and demonstrate the Kingdom of God…

If each of us just start doing that, then the size of the organized church we go to wouldn’t matter. In fact, it would be a non-issue as the main factor in everything wouldn’t be money, people or sheep-sheds.  Instead they would be:

• Are people’s lives being changed? Does their behavior reflect the inward change that comes with meeting the Living God?
• Are the systems of evil and injustice being torn down in the local community?
• Are the widows, orphans, single parents, homeless, and forgotten-ones in the local community being loved, feed, clothed and befriend?
• Is there a sense of love among the followers of Jesus? Are they gathering together in unity to praise and worship God Almighty simply because He is God?

To me, these are the markers of a follower of Jesus, corporate or individual.

“When the church is driven more by the idea of success rather than obedience, it really hasn’t traveled far off the road called failure.”

-A homeless person in Santa Cruz California to Sean McMasters