How Do You Define Success?
I define success in terms of Kingdom impact. For example, if I help 1,000 people with rent, utilities, and food but lead no one to Christ and add no one to my church then, as far as I’m concerned, I’ve failed.
Jesus said to “Go and make disciples. . .” Our mission statement (for the Southern Territory) is to “make radical followers of Jesus. . .”. This is my gage for success. The challenge comes when I begin to evaluate my ministry and look for tangible results. When I don’t see the results I’m looking for I naturally begin asking tough questions, identifying barriers and looking for practical solutions that will yield results.
Here’s an exercise for you. Divide your yearly worship attendance by the total number of meetings and get an average worship attendance for the year. Get yearly averages for the last 10 to 12 years. This will create a visual image of how your church is doing in terms of attendance and can serve as an evaluation tool in measuring the effectiveness of your church. Here is an example of a Corps here in the Southern Territory.
The dark blue represents the morning worship and the pink represents Sunday school. The highest average attendance in morning worship was about 50 back in 1993. In 2005 this church averaged 48. Sunday School attendance has dropped from 58 to 34 over the course of 13 years.
Is this church effective? What’s your church look like? Does your average worship attendance reflect the number of seekers recorded each year?
Probe, prod, explore, investigate and ask hard questions. Are we effect? If so, how? If not, why not?
posted by Bret at
11:33 PM
3 Comments:
Hey Bret. You've really been doing a lot of work. Thanks for sharing your passion and giving people a practical idea for how to put things into perspective.
Forever learning,
Johnny
By
Johnny, at 7:05 AM
In the postmodern context when Christians are leaving organized churches at a great rate because of the effect of Christendom, I do not believe an accurate measure of "success" (by the way where is that word in the Bible) is measured by Sunday attendance. George Barna comments on this in his latest book, "Revolution."
In these days it may be the more effective measure is community change around the corps itself and the missional outreach of a corps. In this day it may not necessarily translate into larger numbers on Sunday. It may be you will have a few more Bible studies, prayer meetings and lots of social action.
By
Larry, at 9:18 AM
Larry,
I couldn’t agree with you more. We can’t measure our effectiveness solely on Sunday school and holiness meeting attendance. (Sorry if I insinuated that.) However, a ministry that is adding more Bible studies, prayer meetings and engaging in lots of social action would be a growing ministry whether it’s on Sunday morning or not.
Thanks for your input. “Revolution” is a good book.
By
Bret, at 1:13 AM
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