Are you transactional or interactional?

I was having a conversation with a friend last week, where we discussed the advantages and pitfalls of growth-in-numbers-orientated Christian mission, otherwise known as the rapid church growth model. In short, does having quantitative targets (of the numbers of churches we aim to plant, and the numbers of members we aim to have in them), provide a focus for us as mission workers (or we could say for anybody who's part of a church) to strive towards and thus achieve more, or does it negate the uniqueness of the individuals being 'reached' and thus dishonour them along with the God who made them unique?

I was on the numbers side, having being trained in that when I worked as a fundraiser and had to answer to people giving big sums of money in order to see 'results'; my friend was on the individual's side; but we both gained new perspective through talking it over. I think I saw that the numbers model really only applies to the planning stage at the start, and as a way to review our vision as things move on. It cannot be used on an everyday level, when relating to people. What's more, we cannot control those numbers, only God can.

However we could have something like this when preparing our vision-statment:

# I want to help people who are depressed out of depression, using individualised approaches appropriate to thier needs.
# I aim to help 5 people out of depression every year for the next three years.
# By having this aim, I hope to get off my backside and into the area of my intended action, and will review if I started to do this in three months time by seeing if I have found (or seriously looked for) one person to help :-)

Today I had another conversation where someone had a choice of which approach to use. What happened was this: I asked a friend how his daughter was, as she has recently moved abroad. He asked in reply, 'Do you mean her visa issue?' No, I didn't mean her visa issue. I wanted to know how she was! But my friend naturally focussed on a task associated with that person, rather than the person themselves. He is in a great interactional relationship with her, and yet when conversing with me about her, she became the subject of a transaction for him - in this case a visa one (rather than a numbers one).

So the question is:

Do we deal with people, or relate to people?
Do we treat people as transactions, or interactions?
Are we transactional, or interactional?