At The Table of Thanks

The Measure of a Church

Over the sixteen years that I have been consulting with churches, one of the most difficult topics to address is the question of the measure of a church's effectiveness.

Like any modern organization, numbers tend to dominate the discussion.

Two Churches, Same Stats

For example, the annual statistical report that congregations submit to Louisville provides an interesting but quite incomplete picture of a congregation. A casual look at this sample graph of three statistical measures would give you an idea that all is not healthy with this congregation. However, if all you knew was the red line's membership growth statistic, that from 1985 to 2010 the congregation grew from around 300 to over 1500 members, you'd rightly think that this is a growing, healthy church.

Then again, if we add in the worship attendance (blue line) and stewardship pledging (green line), we can see that the picture of a congregation's health is much more complicated that membership numbers.  Numbers don't tell everything, and cannot tell the whole story of a congregation. It cannot tell us, for example, that in this hypothetical church, a flood devastated the community in the late nineties, on the heals of a large employer moving their operation overseas. Membership remains steady, growing a bit, but worship attendance and giving declined.  Or, the same statistics for a different congregation could be representative of a series of short pastoral tenures in a church of strong programs for children and youth. So, worship attendance drops while participation in other programs of the church remain strong.

It is important to understand context, so that the numbers provide meaning and insight.  The issue still remains how should we measure theses sample churches. Same numbers, different context.

Faithfulness, the Holy Rationalization

In virtually, every church where I've done work, the issue of measuring their church's life and ministry is a problematic question. I don't see it primarily as an organizational question of statistics and trend lines.  How many times have I heard pastors and parishioners say, "God doesn't call us to be effective but faithful." Or something to this extent. I find this a statement of false piety and the deflecting away of responsibility for the outcomes of the church's life. It dodges the reality that God created us with intention for us to live lives of purpose in Jesus Christ. It suggests a passive kind of faith that lacks a clear sense of God's calling.

The faithfulness claim is really about the church not to being treated like any other organization, so that it avoids scrutiny. Of course, it isn't just like any other organization, and of course, faithfulness is a core facet of our calling to follow Christ.  The question is what should be our standard for being faithful. Do we each come up with our own personal standard because at the end of the day, our faith is entirely personal, between God and me?  Or is there something that we all share as the chruch that calls us to a common aspiration of performance?

How do I know when I am faithful? How do I know if I'm meeting God's standard.

Here are two Scripture references that I find helpful.

First, Ecclesiastes 3:1-15.

For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven:
a time to be born, and a time to die;
a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted;
a time to kill, and a time to heal;
a time to break down, and a time to build up;
a time to weep, and a time to laugh;
a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
a time to throw away stones, and a time to gather stones together;
a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
a time to seek, and a time to lose;
a time to keep, and a time to throw away;
a time to tear, and a time to sew;
a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
a time to love, and a time to hate;
a time for war, and a time for peace.

 What gain have the workers from their toil? I have seen the business that God has given to everyone to be busy with. He has made everything suitable for its time; moreover, he has put a sense of past and future into their minds, yet they cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end. I know that there is nothing better for them than to be happy and enjoy themselves as long as they live; moreover, it is God’s gift that all should eat and drink and take pleasure in all their toil. I know that whatever God does endures for ever; nothing can be added to it, nor anything taken from it; God has done this, so that all should stand in awe before him. That which is, already has been; that which is to be, already is; and God seeks out what has gone by.

God meets us in the reality of our lives. We go through the seasons of life. We live with a sense of history, of time and place, and gain the knowledge for how we can adapt to the changes that come in life. And we do this in a life context of God's engagement with us throughout our lives, from before our creation through our passage from death into eternal life.

There is an intentionality that God wishes upon his human creatures to eat, drink and take pleasure in all their toil. To take pleasure in our work is a judgment that we make about what we do. It is a measurement that gives us joy at accomplishing something of real worth. That judgment provides us perspective on the context of our lives lived within the intentionality of God's purpose. This is the world that God has created. To see that our calling is to simply be faithful in some generic sense, empties the meaning of the work that we are to do as his human beings. It is a statement that this world, a world that God has created with clear purpose, has only a secondary, or instrumental purpose. That there is no inherent value in what happens day to day, all that matters is what is to come later, we are in effect passing time in a faithful manner. I don't think this is the perspective that we gain from the Scriptures. And yet, it is one of the guiding ideologies of the modern church, to be people of faith, faithfully serving their Lord without concern for the outcome of their faithfulness. 

This spiritual question this raises is about how we are to actually live our lives, and be the church. Not the church in our imaginations, but the church on the ground, in the streets and in our places of work.

Let's look at Ephesians 4:4-10.

But God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love with which he loved us even when we were dead through our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ—by grace you have been saved— and raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, so that in the ages to come he might show the immeasurable riches of his grace in kindness towards us in Christ Jesus. For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God— not the result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are what he has made us, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand to be our way of life.(Emphasis mine.)

The life we live is not our life, but God's gift of kindness to us. It is a gift that deserves our gratitude to God, and our stewardship of that gift.

There is an intentionality to our lives that we miss if all that we are wrapped up in is trying meet some self-determined arbitrary set of rules for what it means to be faithful. In other words, to truly be faithful is to live our lives according to the grace that has been given to us in the concreteness of the talent, personality and social context where we live. When we do this, we each, in our own unique way, become agents and vessels for God's grace in the same concreteness of the world.

To focus on OUR faithfulness is to be distracted from the sufficiency of God's grace as we meet Christ in every hour of the day.

This is an important perspective for churches to grasp. For a church in a real world context is more than a social network of spiritually connected people who are organized as followers of Jesus Christ in a specific time and place. If instead of treating the church like another non-profit organization for the social and spiritual welfare of the community, we see the church as a place of sending people out to live the lives that God, by his kindness, created to be our way of life in that same community, then we begin to see the question of how we measure the church in a very different manner.

The Measure: Mission and Impact

The challenge of measurement is not finding things to measure, but rather measuring those things that provide a true measure of a church's performance. This is especially challenging for churches because we have typically not looked at the church from a performance perspective. Instead, we see the church as a cultural / spiritual community, and faithfulness has more to do with upholding traditions, than achieving some goal.

In a post-Christendom context, the rationale for this approach is less valid. As followers of Jesus Christ, we are living as aliens and exiles. We exist as a constructive social counter-force whose transforming presence creates change. It is this change that we look to as our measure. But to understand the nature of this change, we must begin at a different point.

The Circle of Impact diagram is a conversation guide that I use to help churches and other organizations understand the connection between the Three Dimensions of Leadership - Ideas, Relationships and Structure and the Connecting Ideas - Mission, Values, Vision and Impact. The purpose of the Connecting Ideas is to tie together the Three Dimensions.

For measuring purposes, Mission and Impact are the key ideas.

The church's mission focuses and directs the activities that take place through the structures of the church. For example, one of the churches with whom I've worked developed a new mission statement as a part of a planning process that I facilitated. Their mission is "... to discover and share just how much God loves us" and is applied through every aspect of their church's social and organizational structure. This means that worship, outreach, administration, child care, property management, music and other aspects of their congregation's life have as their mission "... to discover and share just how much God loves us."  As a result, as often as needed, the Session, the pastor, committee members and the congregation as a whole can ask, just how is this part of our church's life helping us "... to discover and share just how much God loves us?"

A compelling mission statement like this one is not just the obligatory God-speak for the cover of the Sunday bulletin. Instead, it serves as a guide for how the whole of the church functions. By providing direction, the church has a better idea for how to measure whether it is fulfilling the intention of the mission statement.

Still, even a well crafted mission statement, like our example here, can turn out to be not specific enough for measuring the church's effectiveness. This is why the idea of impact emerged in my thinking several years ago.

Let me be clear about what I mean by Impact. I see it as change that makes a difference that matters. It is change. Without change there is nothing to measure. With change that is aligned with our mission, we have a measure of the church that makes a difference.

What change do we see in people, and what change do we see in the church when we fulfill our mission "...to discover and share just how much God loves us." What is the transformation you see when a person is transformed by the grace of God. Think hard. Be specific. Write it down if you must. Talk about it. Wrestle with it. For if you can identify the change that your mission in Jesus Christ is intended to create, then you can develop the programs that produce this transformative effect.

Without a clear mission, it is difficult to identify what to measure. And even with a clear mission, but lacking in a clear understanding of the impact that should result, it is difficult to establish a measure that makes a difference.

What does this measure tell us? More than anything a measure of impact is providing us a picture of the active grace and love of God alive and effective through the church. The more we see God's grace in reconciliation and spiritual transformation, the greater our awareness of "just how much God loves us" becomes. The purpose of measurement is not primarily organizational, but rather spiritual to unite us with Jesus Christ as the church.

This emphasis on impact is a shift for virtually every church. What is the shift away from? It is a shift away from measurement by activity and numbers, and toward what changes because of your congregation's life in Jesus Christ. It is the difference between describing a vacation trip by looking at your credit card statement, or by telling stories of places and people who touched your life.

A mission statement that only describes what you do as a church is not going to help you identify what your congregation's impact should be. A statement that describes the change you want to create provides a platform for organizing the whole church to be centers of transformative change.

Change

Is the word a noun or a verb?

Which is it for the church?

Is change what happens to congregations?

Or, is change what we do as congregations?

It is an important question.

The reality that most churches face is that if they do not change they will be changed. The question therefore is what kind of change do we want.

The Meaning of Change

Sometime during my life time, an idea became embedded in the cultural DNA of the church which suggested that the church is a bulwark against societal change. We began to think that this is the one institution that can remain the same and also remain vital. We sold our members on this notion that change is bad, and stasis is good.

The truth is actually the opposite.

Changing is the only way to stay alive. Not changing is how you become a rock. When Jesus told Peter, "upon this rock, I'll build my church," I don't think he was referring to become an actual rock. Rather, to be resilient in the face of change.

There is a lot that can be discussed about change. And over time, I will address it here. There is one thing I want to say about it now to establish a centerpoint for all other discussions about change.

The  Circle of Impact

There are three broad dimensions that we address in our life and work. I call these the Three Dimensions of Leadership. I define leadership as "personal initiative to create impact." Each person, therefore, has the capacity and opportunity, every day, to lead. Each person living in the midst of the everyday dimensions of ideas, relationships and the social and organizational structures, where we live and work, including our churches, can lead by taking initiative to make a difference that matters.

Within the Circle of Impact are four ideas that I call The Connecting Ideas. They are Mission or Purpose, Values, Vision and Impact. These ideas are the glue that holds the three dimensions together. As a result, there is an alignment that happens when the Connecting Ideas matter.

When your mission is clear, then how you organize the church is given direction. When your mission is not that important, then the functioning of the organizational structure takes an importance that primarily resistant to change. This is the situation that I see in many churches that are struggling with change. Structure isn't determined by their mission, but by their tradition of activity. The old line, "We've never done it that way." is a classic statement of a church that is unclear about the Connecting Ideas. It is a church that can't tell you what its mission is, what its values are, what its vision for the future is or what its Impact is. It is essentially a museum vaguely reflecting a long passed time when the Connecting Ideas were alive and directive.

Dealing with Change

If you want to address change, you must begin to do the following.

First Step: Conversation about what matters

Start talking about the Connecting Ideas.

What is your mission? What's the impact of your mission? What difference, really, what difference does it make?

The most effective missions are externally focused. If your mission is just about the people who are already there, then the people who are not will see that there is no place for them in your congregation.

Be honest with yourselves.  Because if you are not, change will be what happens to you, instead of what you do to create the future that is in your hearts and minds by the Spirit of God.

Second Step: Care for Each Other

If on a small scale, caring for each other in your congregation becomes a part of your mission, then you must create a structure that enables it to happen. You can't just desire it. You must create structure to make it work. Structure serves Mission, and Mission serves People.

The best way to start? Small groups that practice four things. Pray for each other, study together, fellowship over meals, and serve others together.

Third Step: Encourage Each Person to Take Initiative to Make a Difference

There are a lot of positive changes that are taking place in churches. None of them though happen without significant growth in participation and contribution by members.

So, if you are listening, you'll understand that changing (verb) the church begins with changing oneself (verb) to create the change (noun) that you desire rather than the kind that you don't.

Change is personal and communal. We go through it together. It either makes us stronger and the church survives, or we cave into its stresses and fear, and the church declines.

Change is a context of faith. It is a time where we learn the content and character of the faith that we believe. We learn whether it is just an idea, or something more. The more is the difference that matters. It is what I pray you find together as a congregations.