Just Start. Then Iterate.
I have had countless conversations with church leaders across the country. From Alaska to Arizona, New York to Florida. So many of them love the idea of actually measuring our effectiveness in ministry. They get excited about what it could look like if they actually knew their congregations and where they were in their relationships with Jesus.
In a short period of time, almost without fail, that enthusiasm turns into paralyzation. They wonder how they can do it. They start thinking about what questions to ask, what platform to use, how to analyze the data and quickly get overwhelmed.
I get it. I felt the same way. I’m not a data analyst. I’m a pastor. While I did get my undergraduate in Economics, I have spent the last decade and a half of my life in full time ministry and before that was in seminary. As valuable as the payoff is, figuring this stuff out isn’t always easy.
The biggest lesson I’ve learned, though? It’s much harder to start than it is to get it right. Yet most of the people I talk with spend all of their time trying to figure out how to get it right and never start.
Whether it’s in the marriage space or discipleship space - I inevitably am always asked one question. Almost never this bluntly, but almost always with this meaning: why do you get to decide what questions to ask? What makes your questions the right ones to ask?
That’s a fair question. We want to do things well and measuring the success or failure of our programs is an endeavor that we don’t want to take lightly. If we determine something is unsuccessful that is or we say something is successful that isn’t, we risk causing damage to the body of Christ. This is a critical exercise for the church.
There are several ways I could respond to that question. I could point to the decade and a half of pastoral experience I have. I could point to the team that helped ensure we were measuring the correct items and the over 100 years of pastoral experience we have together. I could point to the validation work that was done by a data scientist that did an analysis of our data.
And sure, that stuff is important. But that’s only a small part of the real heart of the question. The larger issue at play? We spend so much time focusing on getting it right that we never actually start. In the meantime, marriages are failing in our church. People are falling away from the faith. If we ever even know it’s happening, we spend all of our time doing crisis management instead of crisis prevention. Not measuring has led to us where we are.
So let me ask you a question: Would you rather learn something that helps you improve today or would you rather spend the next 4-5 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars doing a fully peer reviewed study to get the perfect question set which has been validated?
If you say the latter: fair enough. Get started. The church will benefit from your work.
But let’s be honest. That’s not really the choice for most of us. The real question is if we’re going to do anything at all. It’s easier to mask our unwillingness to roll up our sleeves and get to work with the facade of perfection than to admit we won’t do anything.
We knew we wouldn’t be perfect at the start, but we needed to do something. So we chose to get started and improve our efforts over time. For instance, with our Discipleship Assessment, our pastoral team sat down in a room together and defined what it means for somebody to be a disciple of Jesus. We defined 8 measures or markers of discipleship. Through our study of scripture and pastoral experience we defined what somebody looks like when they are in a living relationship with Jesus Christ. We said they are:
• Saved By Grace
• Connected In Community
• Biblically Rooted
• Serving Others
• Faithful At Home
• Generous With Resources
• Emotionally Healthy
• Sharing The Gospel
We then defined exactly what we mean by these measures. Finally, we spent time figuring out what questions we could ask to determine to what degree people in our church embody those qualities. We were sure to not relate it only to their interaction at our church (just because somebody doesn’t serve at or through your church doesn’t mean they aren’t serving others!).
Then we started. We gave the assessment to our congregation, being sure to make them the primary beneficiary over ourselves.
Did we get that first round completely correct? Not at all. For instance, we learned that our questions regarding Emotional Health were absolutely TERRIBLE. They didn’t get to the heart of what we were trying to find out, caused some confusion, and were not consistent.
But did we learn anything? Absolutely, we did! We went from knowing virtually nothing about our congregation other than attendance and giving trends to equipping every single person who took it with resources to take their next step in their living relationship with Jesus. We learned the differences between our online and in-person audiences, discovering that our online audience struggled with being connected in community while our in-person audience scored higher in that area. We learned that while 94.7% of our congregation prayed regularly outside of Sunday worship, only 40.7% prayed with their spouse regularly (or invested in their marriage’s spiritual health in any way at all). We learned that no matter how frequently they were involved in programs - there was virtually no increase at all in their likelihood of Sharing The Gospel, meaning that we weren’t having an impact in that portion of their discipleship. Sitting on my desk right now is a report full of those kinds of learnings.
And every single one of those points above have been addressed for our church. We now intentionally encourage people to connect with a local body if they don’t live near our church or connect in-person in some way if they live here but prefer to connect online. We have invested deeply in marriages and the spiritual intimacy of those marriages, creating date nights and having events around those exact topics. We’ve now done several sermon series all about how people can Share The Gospel in their neighborhoods and workplaces.
Was our first assessment perfect? Not by a long shot! But we started doing something and those changes have impacted our ministry at every single level.
We then took our question set, learned what we could do better and changed it for the following year. We then did the same thing for the next year. And yes, our questions are WAY better than they were before. But even if it wasn’t perfect, it was incredibly useful.
So let me ask you this: are you willing to start? Once you start, it’s easy to iterate and improve. Getting the questions and process right over time is the easy part. The hard work? Starting. You’ll have excuses about why you can’t do it. Other church leaders you work with will push back and wonder if it’s the right questions or process for you to use.
Just start. Your congregation needs you to disciple them and you can’t disciple them if you don’t know them. Learn something. Then iterate and make it better.
If you want some help in getting started - fill out our form and we’d love to connect.