Assessing for Growth

There are two paths you can take when crafting an assessment for your church or organization. You can lean objective or subjective. Since the goal of most organizations is to get the highest quality data possible, they lean objective. Their goal is to uncover and learn things that the person taking the assessment might not even see themselves.

For instance, if you take the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator assessment, you’ll get asked the same set of questions multiple times in different ways. Their purpose is to help you discover things about yourself of which you might be unaware. In this case: your personality type. The goal is to help you understand why you do what you do. To tell you things about yourself you might not see.

When we started to measure discipleship across 8 key metrics at our church, we initially thought we wanted to pursue that path. We wanted to craft an assessment that indicates with the highest degree of certainty where our congregants are in their discipleship journey. We wanted to use that high quality data to determine how effective our programs were and what we needed to do differently.

The problem with this?

•  It makes the assessment far too long and would create frustration from the end user within our context. Because we’d need to ask the same questions in multiple different ways to ensure we got to the heart of our measurable - we would increase the frustration they already have with surveys rather than decrease it, reducing the likelihood they would enter the process to begin with.

•  Knowing we wanted to provide a custom individual report to every person who took the assessment which surfaces resources for each of their lowest two of our eight discipleship metrics - the likelihood that they would use the resources if they disagreed with the results were low. Here’s what I mean: imagine I give you an objective assessment about your discipleship as a follower of Jesus. Let’s say that assessment reveals you’re not Generous With Your Resources (one of our 8 Discipleship Measures). Objectively, you don’t meet the standards we find in scripture about how a disciple should steward their finances. As true as that analysis of you might be, if you believe you are already generous with your resources, the odds that you’d be willing to take action in that area are slim.

Leaning objective gives us (the church) additional value, but reduces the benefit to the congregant. It makes us the primary beneficiary, not the congregant.

Therefore, we decided to go about things differently out of an effort to put each congregant and their growth first. We decided to operate on the following two hypothesis:

1.     If we lean subjective in our analysis (asking the end-user where they think they are in their discipleship; crafting questions which help them process what they believe to be true): the odds that they’ll utilize the resources we recommend are much higher.

2.     We don’t have to get you people to grow in the area they need to grow to help them grow in that area. All 8 of our measures are deeply correlated with one another. If people grow in any one of their discipleship measures, they will grow in the others as a result.

The great thing is that those hypothesis turned out to be true. Our congregants have actually utilized the resources they were given AND we have proven that if those congregants grow in any one of the 8 measures they grow in all of them. A data analyst ran a correlation matrix o our data and we now know how much growth in any of our measures influences growth in another. To use our example above - if a congregant grows by 25% in their Biblically Rooted score, they grow 10% in their Generous With Resources score. Which makes sense - learning about God’s heart and design for us in Christ through scripture changes our heart and teaches us to be more generous. This probably doesn’t surprise you - but now we have the math to prove it.

“But,” you say, “doesn’t all of this make your data useless? It’s no longer high quality.”

That’s a fair question. There are several parts to the answer:

•  First, as we saw above, our goal is to help people grow. Not for us to have the highest quality data possible. Let me say that again: our goal is to make disciples, not a clean data set. Often, the people who are willing to undertake an effort as difficult as determining where their congregations are in their discipleship are exactly the kinds of people that are incredibly detail oriented. They want to do things right. That is admirable and often useful, but sometimes it gets in the way. In this case, the downside is that the details of the data become more important than the end goal of creating disciples.

•  Second, just because data isn’t A+ quality doesn't mean it’s not useful. Data quality and usefulness is on a spectrum, not binary. Leaning subjective in our analysis doesn’t mean that we don’t learn anything - it simply means we need to ask the right questions and be cautious about the conclusions we draw.

•  Leaning subjective also doesn't mean entirely subjective. There are objective questions inside of our discipleship assessment - but even then, we are simply allowing an opportunity for the individual to voice what they know about themselves, not trying to show them something they don’t know. For example - in measuring somebody’s score in our measure of being Biblically Rooted we ask them both how much of the Bible they have read (objective) as well as how much of what they have read they understand (subjective). We then are able to draw conclusions in our analysis that help us understand how we can better help them engage with scripture as well as how they approach it subjectively. We can then follow this analysis by speaking to what we learn in sermons, small groups, etc.

Jesus commanded us to make disciples. Discipleship is daily taking the next step toward the narrow gate. We must never lose sight of this when we give our churches assessments. The goal isn’t to give us more information, it’s to help every single one of our congregants grow. Crafting assessments in such a way that it has the highest likelihood of helping them grow must not be a side goal but the primary goal.

Don’t assess for a data set. Assess for growth.