Welcome to the Best Practices Night Owl Café, online edition! Each fortnight we'll pose a question in the Best Practices newsletter. Use the comments button to answer.In this week's Best Practices, Mike Temple tells about his "what works" blog, where he offers immediate updates of how various outreach activities involving his church's mall-based outreach center are succeeding. He sees it as a chance to go beyond the usual metrics (baptisms, attendance, tithe) to a bigger picture of outreach success. So our question this week:
How do you evaluate and track the success of outreach activities in your church? Can the number of baptisms or church attendance be the only metric we use? Is it legitimate to do a cost-benefit analysis for evangelism?
I've been of the opinion for a very long time that the metrics we use for measuring success are too narrow in their focus. I've encountered very few leaders who get past baptisms, church attendence and tithe when speaking about ways to quantify outreach and evangelistic success. These are certainly valid, but are they the "end-all"? Are there other metrics that help leaders in determining what success looks like for their congregations? Can we do better than we are currently doing in these areas? Am I the only one with these kinds of thoughts?
ReplyDeleteMike
Thanks for this article Michael. I believe that baptisms, church attendance and tithe are certainly barometers we shouldn't discount.
ReplyDeleteBut I agree with you that we need to get outside the box and consider what other metrics we should be exploring. Your blog just reminded me that I bought a book last year "Breakout Churches" by Thom S. Rainer, that explores some of what you are discussing. You have inspired me to take it off the shelf and read it. I look forward to what I will discover.
We have most recently seen a correlation between involving non-SDA children in our children's choir, (they are almost 100 voices now!) and attracting the parents to involvement in our church and eventual baptism. Our music ministry will begin looking at identifying specific actions that have broken down barriers, and how we can translate these across our other music entities.
We have a non-SDA Sabbath keeper (born and raised!) who is attending our church. He is a classically trained singer. I invited him to sing for our Handel's Messiah presentation and he has been attending ever since. To deepen his commitment, we have involved his wife in children's ministry (Sabbath School, vacation bible school, AYS, etc) since she loves children; and I have recently asked him to participate on our worship committee (after seeking counsel from my pastor).
I believe we are going to have to seriously look at how we "connect" with people. We will have to expand those points of connection.
I would love to hear how other churches are quantifying their effectiveness. I remember sitting in a ministry board meeting 3 years ago. We had just completed a church-wide process of establishing core values for our congregation. The next step was to set quantifiable ministry goals that were aligned with the core values. I cannot tell you the hand-wringing that took place! Heaven forbid we set a measurable goal!
One of our ministry goals aligned with our Outreach core value, was to have 25% of our members actively engaged in outreach activities.
(SORRY THIS IS SO LONG)
Our deacons met and had a Sabbath potluck to discuss ways they could address this. They found that several of the guys were interested in mentoring. Others were involved in sports and wanted to know how they could witness during their outings. So, the Men's Ministry focused their annual men's retreat that year on friendship evangelism. They had speakers come and address outreach, and the men had to commit to some ongoing or concentrated effort (in writing!) They were able to establish that through their efforts over half the men in our congregation became involved in active outreach. One great byproduct of this growth was an increase in ministry involvement by our male youth.
Keep me posted on what you learn.
Michelle, thank-you for the comments. You bring up some wonderful points.
ReplyDeleteYour comments about involvement and unity are on the money!
Baptisms, tithe, and attendence are certainly valuable barometers, and we should never discount them.
However, I sometimes fear that we have only embraced those three as a means to meausure how well a church grows, and we may be missing some growth indicators because these three become self-imposed "blinders" that keep us narrowly focused.
Let me give you an example, and I apologize in advance if this seems a little too lengthy.
I was once a member of a congregation that had a HUGE baptism ratio for the size of the church family. The conference officials lauded the pastor for his efforts because they saw large numbers of people "getting wet." Fact is, the church wasn't healthy at all and didn't have healthy support structures in place to nurture and disciple these people, (who, by the way were probably a little rushed into the baptismal tank before they really knew what was going on.) I'm sure we've all at least heard about the rovolving back door on some churches where it seems that people leave as soon as they come in.
Tithe can be an indicator of growth, but I have learned as I make my journey through ministry that it is not necessarily so. It may mean that a select few did very well over the past year. I currently live in oil country where tithes rose significantly last year when oil prices went through the roof.
Of the three, attendance seems to me to be the closest indicator. People often vote with their feet and many new ones won't stick around if they aren't being fed, making friends, or aren't growing in some way.
Your comments concerning the way your congregation addressed core values is dead on. I have personally witnessed far too many congregations that use tithe and baptisms as barometers but leave discipleship and connectedness of believers with each other in the rearview mirror.
If we look back at the second chapter of Acts we can see indicators of a far more reaching scope. They were connected with one another and moving together in concert towards the goal of sharing Jesus Christ. Admittedly I'm still struggling with the "how-to" of measuring other things like discipleship and unity, but the result is undeniable in Acts 2:41 with a resulting measureable event that we are very familiar with.
I honestly believe that God calls us into deeper metrics than the "big three", but how to quantify other areas is still a bit of a challenge to commnicate with those who only see three viable indicators.