Lillian, I appreciated reading through your conversation with Oliver re: strategy, vision, and church health. A couple quotes I found especially helpful.
- “The tension between qualitative vs. quantitative growth metrics in a church is a real struggle!” (Boyder, L., 2018)
- “Salvation and baptisms are certainly initial measurements, but how do you determine the ongoing growth of the spiritually mature? My head spins at the thought!” (Boyder, L., 2018)
Measuring the health of a church and assessing our effectiveness in making disciples is certainly a challenge. I wanted to offer a couple thoughts to the conversation. I came across some work by Linda Bobbitt on measuring congregational vitality. Her article “Creating Shorter Scales to Measure Congregational Vitality” effectively uses five questions to help congregations assess their overall health. She started with a 29-item scale and then experimented with an 11-item scale, but found the 5-item scale to be as consistent in its results and far less onerous. Her 5-item scale asks churches to rate the following:
- Excitement about the congregation’s future
- A positive force in the community
- Always ready to try something new
- Seek out and using the gifts of members of all ages
- Help members live out their faith in daily lives (Bobbit, L., 2015, p. 11)
You reference the book The 4 Disciplines of Execution in your post. I found the book to be extremely helpful in how we attempt to executive our vision to see our church engage in discipleship. We have been taking steps towards establishing: 1) our most important (wildly important) goals as it relates to discipleship, 2) lag measures that indicate what discipleship looks like in the life of a Jesus follower, and 3) lead measures we can engage in to actually move us in the right direction. We haven’t arrived yet but I am hopeful we can come up with helpful lead measures to increase our capacity to make discipleship more likely.
As the leadership in your church established a new vision that was more measurable I am curious to know if you attempted to establish parameters around discipleship or if you immediately went to more tangible metrics like attendance growth.
References:
Bobbitt, L. (2015). Creating Shorter Scales to Measure Congregational Vitality. Retrieved from http://congregationalvitalitysurvey.com/Research/Creating%20the%20Congregational%20Vitality%20Short%20Scales_Final.pdf
Boyder, L., Response to Leader Post, CM1. LDRS 501 — Strategic Leadership (2018). Retrieved from: https://create.twu.ca/lboyd79/2018/10/11/response-to-leader-post-cm1/
McChesney, C., Covey, S., & Huling, J. (2012). The 4 disciplines of execution. Great Britain: Simon & Schuster UK Ltd.