The article on the front page of the Journal Star today is about the traffic jams around Northwoods Community Church.  Riveting.

I think the most interesting paragraph in the story was this one:

Though it claims only 750 parishioners, attendance at Northwoods has soared to an average of 4,300 members over the last six weeks – 550 more than the count at the beginning of the year.

Isn’t it odd that they have such high attendance, but low commitment?  So many people willing to attend, despite major traffic inconvenience, but so few willing to commit themselves through formal church membership.

Northwoods models their church after Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois.  It’s a “seeker-sensitive” church model, which means that on weekends (Saturday night and Sunday morning) the services are geared toward reaching the unchurched.  The preaching doesn’t focus so much on doctrine and theology, but rather on the felt needs of the people they’re trying to reach.  They set aside Wednesday nights as the time to build up believers and have more “meaty” sermons and extended times of worship; in other words, their Wednesday nights are more like most churches’ Sunday mornings.

I wonder how one measures the success of such a model.  Is success measured in the number of weekend visitors, or the number of committed members?  Or should the measurement be something else entirely?  I’ve been reading a book called Total Truth by Nancy Pearcey, and she claims that, historically, churches didn’t measure “success,” per se, and they certainly didn’t measure it in terms of numbers.  Rather, they were more concerned about doctrinal purity and personal piety.  They spent more time teaching their children the catechisms and their congregations the creeds, and evangelism was more of a personal endeavor than a corporate one.

I wonder how Northwoods defines success, and if they’re pleased or troubled by the disparity between visitors and members.  Maybe Michael Miller can do a column on that in the religion section sometime.  In the meantime, they’re trying to get that traffic situation under control.