Baptism counts can be useful for some things, but on their own they are a very unreliable measure of genuine evangelistic or discipleship success.

Talk about baptisms in your church and the only time that you will hear a Thank God or a Hallelujah is when the numbers of baptisms are mentioned, no matter how small that number.  Do you realize that this is the cover story for an operation off the rails?

Most churches are not making disciples of jesus, but they are doing is actually having members to the church based on the acceptance of the churches doctrinal statement.  It is time for a true confession from the leaders of most of the churches that are claiming either to be the true church or to have the Spirit of God as their distinctive feature.

Imagine that a church can point to its large conventions or its weekly fellowship meals as signs of evangelistic or pastoral success, and you have a revolving snapshot of churches in failure mode.