According to today’s scripture, and just about everything we read in the Bible, increase in numbers is never directly achieved by human effort, it always seems to be the result of something else that God has initiated.  That’s what we see in today’s passage.  The Apostles says that the new church was built up by “Living in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit.”  In other words, there was no branding, direct marketing and sales pitch; instead a group of people committed to making God the priority in their lives, shared this life of faith with others, and this intimacy was blessed to increase the numbers of faithful around them.