“I’ve got a question for you?” the good doctor said, just clearing the door of the coffee shop where we often start the day at adjacent round tops. After dropping his newspaper on the table, ordering his “usual” — a whole grain bagel and latte — and settling in, he poised the query that had been bouncing around in his mind.

“How do you all determine success? Is it the size of the church, finances, the number of souls saved?”

Assuming the “you all” referred to ministers, Baptists or at least church-oriented folks, I slid my laptop to the side, removed my reading glasses, smiled and told him a quick answer was unavailable.

“I try not to reveal too much of a messianic complex, Doc,” I responded, “but, like Jesus, let me answer your question with a story.”

For some reason, my mind immediately retrieved one of the late John Claypool’s personal and poignant accounts from the early days of the Civil Rights movement.

 It was the time when Martin Luther King Jr. went to Louisville, Ky., and the two friends — both former associate pastors in Atlanta-area Baptist churches — were photographed together by the local newspaper.

The fallout was immediate, and Claypool said he was strongly encouraged to publicly distance himself from the racial struggle by some influential lay leaders who felt his association with King and the movement would harm the church.

The specific warning, Claypool recalled, was that taking a stand on the controversial social issue of the day would keep the church from being “successful,” to which the soft-spoken pastor replied: “God does not call us to be successful, but to be faithful.”

Claypool, ever the self-critic, confessed that he had spent his entire adult life seeking “success” even at the expense of “faithfulness.” But he believed his answer was right, even if he personally had not always sought that high goal.

Whether my hastily recalled tale got anywhere near answering the doctor’s sincere question of success, I don’t know. My caffeine-consuming friend probably felt like the schoolboy who was asked to write a little paper on penguins and was handed a 1,000-page volume by the librarian, to which he responded: “I don’t want to know that much about penguins.”

A more succinct answer, I’m sure, would have been appreciated. But I’m unaware of one that does justice to the good question that generations of Christians have sought to answer.

Indeed, numbers — “nickels and noses,” as some call them — have relevance. The only ones who tend to dismiss numbers totally are those with little or none to show.

Statistical data often give us a clearer understanding of the impact — or lack thereof — we are making. Yet we all know that gathering a mob and overfilling coffers can be used for good or ill.

Success — by most modern definitions — is never really addressed by the biblical text. However, faithfulness is repeatedly.

Whatever we accomplish as individual followers of Christ and through our shared endeavors must be done as clear and unbending efforts to be faithful to our divine calling, even when immediate results may not meet some definitions of success.

Perhaps the higher goal of Christian living is to be successfully faithful in all we do.