How Do You Measure a Church’s Success?
Posted in Auxano, Church Unique, Will Mancini, life marks, megachurches, mission measure, missional, vision, vision frame on September 19th, 2008 by Steve Bradley – 2 Comments
In a post last week on Megachurches and Church Growth, I asked the question, “How do you measure the health or growth of a church?“
The problem here is that while such measures are informative, they do not adequately capture the true measure of a church’s missional effectiveness.
The reason? Because the ABCs focus primarily on organizational metrics, ignoring the more elusive and difficult to quantify relational dynamics that mark true missional success.
Put more plainly, if a church’s mission is to make disciples, they need to have some idea of what they’re trying to make.
So how does a church know this? By asking questions such as these:
- How do we determine who and who is not a disciple?
- What is our definition of spiritual growth or maturity?
- What characteristics or qualities does a disciple exhibit?
- How do we measure spiritual fruitfulness?
Such questions move beyond the mere accounting of resources, towards a more relational model that measures success in terms of character qualities or missional life marks (for more on this, see Chapter 15 of Mancini’s book, Church Unique).
How does your church measure success? Do you have a common target or bull’s-eye that you’re all aiming at?
