The two big items that most churches have as their primary KPI’s are, you guessed it, attendance and income, people and dollars. I’m not saying that these aren’t important. They are important in managing your church and should likely be part of it’s dashboard reporting but they don’t tell the story about how successful the church is at achieving it’s kingdom vision.

I recently saw an online advertisement not just offering to but promising to double the attendance of your congregation in 90 days. It hi lighted how the old (and it said wrong) way to grow your congregation started with the hard work of preparing a great sermon, but the new (and right) way centered around social media advertising and automated follow up systems.

Now I don’t have anything against using social media and follow up systems, but the advertisement didn’t sit well with me. It focused solely on growing attendance which it saw as the major goal with no mention of what Jesus said were the most important things.

Jim Collins, author of Good to Great recently stated in an interview with Carey Nieuwhof that for churches, growth is a bad goal and that in fact growth is a residual outcome of building a great flywheel. In the interview he also said that “If you get into the idea that growth is the point, you’ve missed the point.”

So what should we be measuring to indicate whether or not our churches are “being successful”?

In recent times I have heard quite a few people discussing what a true measure of success might look like. As leaders search for different measures, one of the great opportunities that we have is that we can re-define what success looks like and develop scorecards that reflect this.

Scoreboards will not only help measure progress but help keep us focused on making the main thing just that; the main thing.

Larry Walkemeyer in his book “The River Church – Unleashing a Culture of Multiplication In Your Church” writes:

Scoreboards are those internal metrics we use to measure what “winning” looks like. The predominant church scoreboard tallies points for larger attendance, increased notoriety, bigger budgets, professed conversions, and more buildings. But what if our scorecards don’t match God’s?

Larry suggests the following four questions to stimulate thinking around a scorecard for your church:

1. How many are in Disciple Making Relationships In Your Church?
2. How many are on mission with Christ based on their Ephesians 2:10 uniqueness?
3. How many had a Gospel Conversation this week?
4. How many are contributing in some way towards planting the next church?

No scorecard is going to be perfect, and different churches and their leaders will come up with different scorecards that emphasise different measures. Perhaps the following questions may help you to contextualise and design a scorecard that works for your church?

How are we going at:

1. making disciples that are representative of the Great Commission?
2. loving others as Jesus commanded us in the New Commandment?
3. seeing the demographic composition of our church reflect that of the community in which we are based?
4. empowering people irrespective of age, ethnicity or gender?
5. raising and multiplying leaders and people ministering to others?
6. making a measurable difference in the broader community?

I’m sure that there are many other questions that could be asked, but grappling with these questions might be a good starting place.

QUESTION FOR REFLECTION:

What should the scorecard for your church look like?

Tim O’Neill
National Leader, Exponential Australia