Could our church be bigger?  Could our school be bigger?  Would we be more successful, a better church and a better school, because we are bigger?  We were bigger both as a church and as a school at one time – much bigger.  We enacted purposeful changes, doing things consciously differently, that made us or resulted in us being smaller.  It wasn’t necessarily that we wanted to become smaller in number.  When we changed, however, we got smaller, and that was good.  We’re better now.  Even though more people gathered here either for church or school, all of them really were not with us.  It is akin to Jesus having 25,000 people following Him for the wrong reason, who then stopped following Him at the end of John 6.  Jesus gave a message that resulted in those people not following Him anymore.  There are some churches that continue to do what we did, and in many cases much worse than what we did, that have stayed bigger or even become bigger.   Especially in the long run, but even in the short term, they are hurting and not helping.  Most of the strategies today that go into church growth, that are meant to increase numbers of attendees, are man-centered, humanistic, manipulative, carnal, turn churches into things that are not really churches, and result in many who think they are saved, but are not.  Everything is worse because of it.