YOU ARE WHAT YOU MEASURE

The other day I came across yet another article in a seemingly endless stream about church growth. We Christians in the United States spend a lot of our time and energy on church growth. A quick Google search using the term church+growth yielded 218,000,000 hits (and no, I don’t think Google rigged the results to make it appear that the Church is "failing"). Articles referenced include “7 Reasons Why Churches Stop Growing and Decline‎”. In counterpoint to these seven factors you can read “7 Things That Will Drive Future Church Growth”, or, if seven is too many, you can consult “The Five Most Important Church Growth Principles”. Yes, the American Church is obsessed with growth.

But this shouldn’t really surprise us. American culture is steeped in the notion that bigger is better. Growing up in Detroit I was familiar with the phrase “what is good for General Motors is good for the country”. I worked for many years for large multinational corporations and can attest to their single-minded focus on growth as an indicator of heath, often to the detriment of long term health and stability. Analysts pour over metrics like year over year revenue growth, quarter to quarter income growth, and year over year order backlog and punish a company’s stock for falling short of their growth expectations.

Therefore, it’s just natural that American churches would borrow the growth ethos from the business world and try to apply it to their situation. Is our congregation growing? Why isn’t our congregation growing? What kind of programs do we need to drive growth? If we move the service times around to accommodate young families will that help our church grow? If we move to a new location will we grow? Is our budget growing or shrinking? What kind of stewardship campaign do we need to make our budget grow? If we bring in a consultant will that lead to growth? Will bringing in a new minister help us grow? You’ve heard them all. As with industry, growth has become the preeminent indicator of congregational health, sometimes to the detriment of our long-term health and stability.

But is growth the appropriate metric to use to gauge church success? What if growth, rather than being a primary indicator, is a secondary metric or even an artifact of something churches aren’t measuring? Could focusing on a new set of metrics impact a secondary metric like growth? The key question is, are we measuring ourselves against the mission given to us by Christ or against a culturally-driven indicator of success?

I would like to suggest that the primary metric churches should use is “lives touched”. Christian congregations are called to serve the people in their community, but they do not measure themselves against this calling. Using Canyon Creek Presbyterian Church as an example, “lives touched” can be measured in many ways; standards like attendance at worship service, but also the number of people outside the church who use our facility, the number of people fed at Austin Street Shelter each week, the number of children in Sunday school classes, the number of people who attended the annual refugee picnic, how many shut-ins we visited, the number of classroom teachers supported at Otto Middle School, etc. The list can become quite long and it would take practical experience to determine which measure is most effective.

But the bigger question is, would increasing the number of “lives touched” by a congregation result in an increase in church membership and budget at a statistically significant level? I’m not sure what an implementation of a “lives touched” metric would look like, but I’d like to try it. Personally, I believe that if churches focus the considerable energy and talents of the Christian community on being and doing what Jesus called us to be and do, growth will take care of itself.

SAME KIND OF DIFFERENT AS US

Thought For The Day

“The five points of yama, together with the five points of niyama, remind us of the Ten Commandments of the Christian and Jewish faiths, as well as of the ten virtues of Buddhism. In fact, there is no religion without these moral or ethical codes. All spiritual life should be based on these things. They are the foundation stones without which we can never build anything lasting.”

- Swami Satchidananda

I have often posited that the great religions of the world are all contextual cultural expressions of the same God who revealed him/her self to different peoples in different ways in different places at different times.  One of my reasons for making this assertion is the core principles held in common by these belief systems; in essence, a variation of the “golden rule” found in Christianity.

In her book, “The Great Transformation”, Karen Armstrong traces the root of these common set of core beliefs to what she calls “the axial age”, a period beginning around the 9th century BCE where the peoples of four distinct regions of the world created the religious and philosophical traditions that continue to the present day: Confucianism and Daoism in China, Hinduism and Buddhism in India, monotheism in Israel, and philosophical rationalism in Greece. Rabbinic Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are considered offshoots of the original Israelite vision.

Despite some differences of emphasis, there was a remarkable consensus in their call for an abandonment of selfishness and a spirituality of compassion. These two principles underly all of these religious traditions.

What would our world look like if we focused on the God-given universal call for compassion that transcends faiths rather than on the superficial differences in religious practices?