Measuring church Impact

In a couple of weeks at the Foursquare Church’s annual convention, I’ll help present information about Mobilizing Our People for Ministry and Mission. I think this is pretty important stuff, so I’m excited to be a part of the conversation. Here is part of what I’m going to say:

Pastors and churches too often measure health and impact only by the size of their attendance and offerings. There are some who think the bigger the church, the better leader the pastor must be. I even heard one leader of a large ministry talk about how “most pastors of small churches can’t lead their way out of a paper bag”.

Sometimes that’s true. Sometimes. Just like it’s sometimes true that pastors of large churches are money-hungry or power-addicted. Of course, generalizing either way is deeply flawed because there are plenty of good and godly pastor/leaders of both large and small churches.

I do know that determining effectiveness only by the size of the congregation is a dead-end street, because in some cases even a few thousand people may not be very many. Consider this:

What if you based impact on the percentage of your city or town that attended your church? With this assessment, some small town congregations that have 10% of their population attending would be much more effective than mega-churches located in mega-cities.

But that measurement is a dead end street, too! In either case you are not going to get every person in your community—or even a majority percentage of it—to attend your church. This would take more services than you had time for and more resources than you could possibly manage. And aside from this logistics challenge, there would be the fact that people have a million reasons why they may not want to go to a church, or even your church (and you may be one of those reasons)!

So if it isn’t by raw attendance or relative percentages alone, what would be a more accurate way to measure impact?

What if you could determine how many people or how much of the community the people in your church were encountering?

The “church as a force” concept that Jerry Cook wrote about in Love, Acceptance, and Forgiveness is important to grasp. Church is not about getting as many people onto your field (your campus) as possible so you can minister to them…not that there’s anything wrong with that happening, because wherever God’s presence and God’s people are found, attractive, transformative ministry to all kinds of folks is going to break out. Healthy strategic and intentional congregational growth can—and I think should—be celebrated.

Church is, however, about the Body functioning together as a force on the earth that takes the truth and power of the Gospel everywhere they go. If our growing churches aren’t equipping people to manifest the Gospel, and if our smaller churches are content to simply enjoy intimate family gatherings, we are totally missing the mission of the church!

In other words, we can start to determine health by assessing how much of our community the people of our church are really impacting.

Because you will never get everyone in your community into your church, but you just might be able to get everyone in your church out into your community!