The One Third
One Third.
That fraction haunts me.
Why? It’s the number of people who walked out the back door of churches across the United States in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. It’s how many left the church where I serve as the Pastor of Discipleship. It’s also the same number that virtually every church leader I spoke with from across the United States saw leave their church. It didn’t matter if they were small or large; traditional or contemporary; and all of them were leaders who cared deeply about their people. Almost all of them witnessed one third of their church’s people disappear.
What was the demeanor many in church leadership took toward those who left? “They aren’t committed to their faith. If they were, they wouldn’t have walked away when things got hard.”
Perhaps that’s true. People are accountable for their relationship with Jesus. All followers of Jesus are responsible to not give up meeting together as some are in the habit of doing (Hebrews 10:25). The weakening of discipleship & commitment to faith in the American church has long been a concern and COVID accelerated that shift which started long ago.
But…many of us leaders ignored our responsibility for that number. Every church leader I spoke with was surprised by it. If we were surprised by it, then we don’t know our people. If we don’t know our people, how can we disciple them well?
Be honest. Be brutally honest with yourself for a moment: what do you actually know about your congregation?
I’m willing to bet that, without looking, you can share your average Sunday morning attendance, weekly giving, and, if you’re ahead of the curve, how many people attend certain ministries - especially the ones you care most about.
But what do those numbers tell you? Attendance only tells us if we can get people into the room not if what’s happening in that room is helping them become more like Jesus. Weekly giving doesn’t tell us much about people’s generosity. Is it from a couple of large donors? A lot of small donors? Is it sacrificial? The metrics most of us pay the attention to tell us more about our marketing effectiveness than they do our ministry effectiveness.
I was a Small Group Pastor for 6 years before I became a Discipleship Pastor where I serve now. When I oversaw small groups, the single greatest metric touted to determine if your small group ministry was effective and healthy was if at least 40% of your congregation was involve in a group.
What does that metric say about the effectiveness of small groups? Nothing. It tells us how good we are at marketing them. It doesn’t mean that any life change is actually happening.
This doesn’t mean marketing effectiveness is unimportant. We want to reach as many people as we can and get as many people involved in effective ministry as possible. But we should never start with marketing effectiveness. Our first measures should always be: what do people need and what works to achieve those ends. Then, once we determine the answers to those two questions we should get as many people involved as possible.
This isn’t what most of us do. We tend to focus on how many people attend our churches and ministries.
Last I checked, Jesus didn’t tell us to make attenders. He told us to make disciples.
Before you hear what I’m not saying: it’s not true that most pastors and leaders measure attendance and giving because they don’t care about Jesus or His people. Sure, there are some that only want to grow their platform, “pastors” that only care about numbers because of their ego or avarice. But in my experience - those are uncommon (even if they get virtually all the headlines). Most pastors & church leaders actually care about making disciples. But measuring ministry effectiveness is difficult. It takes learning, effort, and intentionality. It’s easier to skip that step and measure our marketing efforts and assume that our programs do what their creators promise they do.
Here’s that fraction again: One third.
It’s time to change. To do the hard work. To find out where our people are in their relationships with Jesus. To help them go from where they are to where God is calling them to be.
How can you discover where your congregation is in their faith journey and the depth of their discipleship? How can we know how many of the people in your church on a Sunday morning are Christians? How many are non Christians?
How about their spiritual habits? The trajectory of their faith - is it declining or increasing? The frequency with which they talk with their children about the faith? Do they read or understand the Bible? How about the strength of their marriages or their desire to be married if they’re single or single again? Is their generosity sacrificial or is it convenient?
How can we see the benefits of the programs we offer?
I’ll give you more details in future posts, but here’s the two major components of a strategy to measure what matters:
1. Stop relying on anecdotes to tell you what they don’t say. A few stories are not necessarily indicative of your entire congregation. You have confirmation bias. You will see what you want and you want your programs to work. You want your sermons to be life changing. So you will remember stories and give examples of when it does. But it’s not about you. You’re not in ministry for your ego. You’re in it because you want to help people come to faith in Jesus and become more like Him. This doesn’t mean anecdotes aren’t useful. Stories matter. Estimations are helpful. But they don’t tell us everything. If they did, one third wouldn’t be such a haunting number.
2. Listen. Listen to what your people are already telling you. Do they give you prayer requests? Write them down in a spreadsheet. Add to that file the pastoral concerns people come to you and your staff about during the week. After several months you’ll quickly discover patterns and repeated areas of struggle. As a bonus, you also just figured out what you can preach on for the next year and what your programming can address to be relevant and well attended!
3. Ask. Ask your people those questions we mentioned above. Ask them where they are in their relationship with Jesus. In what programs are they involved? Where are they seeing life change and what they’re struggling with it? Scared to ask or not sure how? It’s okay, you won’t get it perfect - but you will learn more than you know now and you can get better the next time!
If we don’t know our people, how can we disciple them? How can you speak to them on Sunday morning and know where God is challenging them and calling them to go if you don’t know them? How can you decide on what programs your church needs if you don’t know what your people need?
Measuring isn’t easy and it’s scary. We might find out that what we’re doing doesn’t work and we need to change programs or the topics we address. But do you want to make disciples? Or do you just want to grow a platform?
Measuring matters because God’s people matter and serving them is our calling.