It was much more attractive to me to figure the statistics on an average of 51 good Sundays, rather than on 52 weeks with a bad Sunday. I also noticed that, when attendance was up, I was up. In one church I served, we grew, in less than 10 years, from a small, barely viable church to a congregation that ranked seventh in the state out of 215 churches of that denomination. But it wasn't enough. That left six churches ahead of us.
Numbers are cruel taskmasters.
One never has enough of them. When we began our current congregation with 19 people a few years ago, I counted attendance for the first four months then quit. I made a conscious decision that, no longer, would I, or the leadership, be ruled by the Sunday worship attendance. I was weary of being up and down at the mercy of the statistics. So, we didn't count the attendance for over a year.