Google has its strengths and it has its limitations. Sometimes I find more about a subject than I would ever ask, and sometimes I find nothing about something important if obscure to the internet world of commerce, scandal, and happenings.
I was thinking of writing a little essay on the subject of church growth. I still may. I was thinking that I might say a congregation is stronger with a smaller membership if they are active, than say a big congregation with few active members. Not a shocking idea, but one that doesn't get talked about in this age in which we privilege quantitative measurement rather than qualitative appraisal.
A wonderful title flashed in my mind, I thought "Better smaller but better." But then I remembered that that was a quote from V.I.Lenin, who was celebrating a split in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party. Lenin was arguing that the Party had too many opportunists, too many drifters and a split between the lean and mean Bolsheviks and the sloppy and pandering Mensheviks was really a good thing. Nothing to do with churches obviously.
Not that there is a copyright on titles, after all how many books have the same titles. Lots.
But I confess. I was afraid that I would be red baited. Red baiting is going around these days, even on UU blogs. Somebody might call me Comrade So Bold, as if reading Marx or Lenin was a sign of mental degeneration. Of course this would come from a person who is still waiting for weapons of mass destruction to be unearthed, or who thinks that Secretary Rice is a "Negro leader." Liberals have an amazing tolerance for slow learners.
Then I thought Lenin also said "one step forward, two steps backward" and I think, gee that must be a Russian dance step. So, "Better smaller but better" was probably a Russian folk idiom. Lenin was no poet, he was a polemist.
۬So I checked by putting the words "Better smaller but better" into Google. Nothing. Now I think Google is illiterate. I can find detailed quotes about a simple parish minister like myself through their search engine and I can't find one from one of the guys who made the twentieth century so stressful.
I Googled the phrase, and guess who comes up quoting Lenin in the second entry? The neocon Francis Fukuyama! If a neoconservative intellectual can get away with it, why can't you? ;)
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/pubaffairs/publications/SAIS_Reports/2005_feb_march/fukuyama.html
I still get no matches!
I was implying that I can use phrases that Lenin might have used.....since he played on common place phrases.
We might recycle ideas as well! In Left wing communism, an infantile disorder he argues that change agents often become infatuated with their ideals and become ineffective scolds because they think they are so much more "advanced" than those they are working with.
Again nothing to do with churhes there.
When you do the google search you need to put the phrase in quotation marks i.e. in the google search entry area you need to put a quotation mark before the word better and after the second use of the word better.