Counting Attendance

I heard of a certain minister that one could see his lips move as he counted the congregation -- and was visibly and verbally upset by any downward trends. I stopped thinking like that at all, many years ago. In both of my major ministries (together nearly thirty years), Church attendance rose considerably overall. At first, I counted the churchgoers -- weekday attendance, too. I dropped this custom, though, in year 6 out of 30 -- although an enterprising member continued to count. From then on, I have only known about Church attendance because somebody told me. OBSERVATION: The biggest reason for this is that I adopted a "sovereignty of God" attitude. God does the work. A lesser reason was simply that I didn't want my heart to be swayed. While one can learn from trends in Church attendance, it seems to me to be simple lessons which make the difference: like the comfort of young mothers in Church, that one ought to have a message for these or for those, or that members would like to be more participative -- and so on.