Measure What Matters
“It’s fine to count our members, but we should also weigh them.”
– elder in a former church
When I was a preacher in an American church, I struggled to keep Sunday worship service attendance from determining how I felt all week. Big crowds excited me, and small crowds discouraged me. How successful I felt was directly tied to how many people showed up, even though I knew this was not a reliable guide for how things were actually going.
A wise friend told me that the most pervasive value of American culture is “more.” We are never satisfied. We want more. We want all our numbers to go up and to the right. That is not all bad, but it is always dangerous. Not all things that grow are healthy, and not all healthy things grow how we expect them to. Cancer and weeds grow easily. And, at 58 years old, any physical growing I do is unhealthy.
That said, God created us to “be fruitful and multiply,” and the Kingdom of God is by nature expansive. God wants “every knee to bow and every tongue to confess Jesus is Lord.” We need to pay attention to how we are doing with the mission God has called us to join with him. Are we being faithful? Are we being fruitful?
In Revelation, Jesus evaluates seven churches from Asia. Some get positive reports, some mixed, and some negative. But those evaluations were not just numerical. Jesus assessed them in terms of their character and love for him, not their attendance. But numbers matter as well.
It was possible to read my last blog as a spiritualized avoidance of accountability. That was not what I thought or intended. However, I do want to make sure that the evaluations we do are holistic and healthy. That is why we have been putting so much time and energy into developing evaluation tools for churches.
Here are some previews of some of the principles we are suggesting.
Avoid the” missionary halo” effect. It is not ungodly to ask hard questions of kingdom workers if it is done in a relationship of trust with understanding and grace.
Evaluate both faithfulness and fruitfulness. Effort matters. Character matters. Don’t just ask how many; ask what kind. Rely on thick, narrative, and qualitative approaches over thin, numerical, and quantitative evaluations.
Focus on lead metrics more than lag metrics. That means measuring the activities that lead to impact, not just the results. Only evaluate what your workers have the capacity to do, not what they can’t do. How are they using their time? How are they engaging those around them? What are their practices? These are all within their power to control. They can’t ultimately control how people respond to them – please keep that in mind. Kingdom workers can plant, water, and fertilize, but they can’t make things grow. Evaluate them based on what is within their capacity to do.
Recognize that different seasons of work should impact what we expect. First-term workers in their first 24 months, who are learning language and culture and establishing relational trust, cannot be expected to have the same impact as mid-term workers who have mastered many of those preliminary building blocks. Late-term workers need to be developing leaders and moving toward an exit strategy. They may limit their work to mentoring a few leaders and have little direct impact on unbelievers or new believers. Their stories will mostly be a generation or two or three downstream of leaders they have developed.
Workers should help shape what is being measured and how they will be evaluated. This agreement should be set up on the front end and be periodically revised. Every worker should know and accept as valid how they are being assessed. Avoid surprises like the plague. (Come to think of it, after COVID, we may need a new metaphor).
Don’t just rely on workers’ feedback. Include the perspective of teammates and local believers as well. This isn’t because kingdom workers are necessarily less than trustworthy. But, as we all have a limited perspective (especially as we work cross-culturally), doing everything we can and hearing from everyone is important for getting a complete and honest picture of their effectiveness.
Remember the parable of the fig tree (Luke 13:6–9). There is a time to use discernment to know if or how to give a ministry some extra time and attention. And be aware that good stewardship also means there is a time to cut it down and plant something else.
If it matters, we should measure it. But how we measure matters. How we treat people as we measure matters. What we do with those measurements matters.
If you are interested in getting further information on how we recommend you use metrics in missions, please email Alan Howell.
Note: You can find more helpful resources here.