What’s in this Episode?

Have you ever heard the saying “numbers are everything?” Well, the fact is, that is very true. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sports, business, politics, whatever it is, people are measuring stuff all the time. And the same is true for the church. So in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what data to measure in ministry. And when you do this, it’s going to help position you for greater growth, greater participation, and more influence in your community.

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Read the Transcript

Jonathan Hardy 0:00
Have you ever heard the saying “numbers are everything?” Well, the fact is, that is very true. It doesn’t matter whether it’s sports, business, politics, whatever it is, people are measuring stuff all the time. And the same is true for the church. So, in today’s episode, we’re going to talk about what data to measure in ministry. And when you do this, it’s going to help position you for greater growth, greater participation, and more influence in your community. Here we go.

Jonathan Hardy 0:29
In year 2013, I was a part of the team planting a new church in the Kansas City, Missouri area. And upon doing so, you’re starting from scratch, as you know, with the church plant. And so, one of the things we had to do at the beginning is determine what are we going to measure? And what are the things that we’re going to use as benchmarks to help us evaluate the ministry and its growth or stagnation and all those different components.

Jonathan Hardy 0:52
And so, we started to, you know, break it down, figure out there, what are the things we want to be measuring as we start the church? And today, we’re going to be talking about what data to measure in ministry. So, whether it’s a new church, whether it’s a particular ministry area, or you know, your church has been in existence for a while, it’s important for us to establish certain data, certain metrics we need to be looking at on a regular basis.

So, we can make evaluation and decisions and all of that. And obviously, on the opposite side, if we don’t know those metrics, then it’s a missing piece when it comes to decision-making and so forth.

Dick Hardy 1:28
Yeah, exactly.

Dick Hardy 1:29
So, today, we’re going to talk about some data that you want to measure. This is not an exhaustive list, although this is going to cover some of the basic things, we really encourage all churches to be measuring. So, Dick, take it away.

Dick Hardy 1:39
Yeah, you know, the very first thing is measuring the thing that you know, all churches measure, and that’s attendance. Now, when I say that, immediately, you go to Okay, how many people were here on Sunday? Okay, you want to know that? That’s part of it. But you need to be drilling all the way down. I remember one time I was talking to a church, Pastor Rick down in mission, Texas. When my first conversation with him, the church had some size at that point.

Dick Hardy 2:04
And I asked him if he had just some metrics of the how the church was doing. And that guy sent me some Excel documents that I’m telling you started with the total attendance, and then broke down by groups, ages, all the way down to the very smallest parts. That pastor was measuring every component of the whole. So, when I say attendance, yes, it’s counting what’s happened on Sunday. But it’s also drilling down into all the pieces.

Dick Hardy 2:35
Now, we talk about the subject of measuring in Episode 40, where we talk about in the midst of COVID. You know, what to do when a church attendance slips. We’re talking about this business of measurements, and I would certainly encourage you to take a look at Episode 40. But, even in today mentioning COVID, this means on measuring online participation.

Jonathan Hardy 3:01
Yeah.

Dick Hardy 3:03
And it can go further than just, okay, how many people are watching? But how many people are participating? And you know, Ryan Wakefield talks about this in his CMU. offering right now that it’s different, just online. Let’s see, viewership versus participation. So, you need to be measuring both. Viewership and participation.

Jonathan Hardy 3:29
So, to clarify, CMU stands for Church Marketing University. In fact, you might as well mention about tomorrow, because tomorrow is the last day.

Dick Hardy 3:36
Tomorrow is the last day to sign up for Church Marketing University, which we really encourage you to take a look at. We’re gonna mention that here at the end. But you go to leaders.church/CMU. You need to take a look at what’s available there. But the whole point on attendance is, measure the whole and measure all the parts.

Jonathan Hardy 3:52
And then you can even break it down and look at different things. So, you can look at what’s your attrition, if you’ve had, you know, some decrease. Or what’s your percentage of increase? And you’re able to kind of break down, once you start really nailing down all of these main things, then all of a sudden, the formulas can start doing the magic for you. And you can really learn a lot.

Dick Hardy 4:08
Exactly, and then I would recommend you do what’s called a 52 week average. So, you’re doing a 52-week running average. If you don’t do that, what happens is I referenced a pastor friend of mine over in Oklahoma. His view of whether the church is growing or not, is whether Sunday was up or down.

Jonathan Hardy 4:26
Yeah.

Dick Hardy 4:26
And you can’t do that. You need to be measuring. And I recommend really the 52 weeks, where this is constantly turning for you, the last 52 weeks, and you’re going to see your increases are not like this, you know, your increases are like this. And your decrease, you’re just going to track way better, as you’re measuring all the parts of your attendance.

Jonathan Hardy 4:45
Yeah. The second metric we obviously would encourage you to do, would be related to giving. So, tracking, obviously the tithe, the money coming in. But then you might even look at the number of givers. So, the number of people that are tithing and giving. You might look at the percentages. How does that percentage of givers compare to the entire people attending your church? And so, you want to be able to see, are we are we having an increased percentage wise, of people participating in the ministry with their giving?

Jonathan Hardy 5:15
So, that’s one thing you want to do. And percentages is always the key. You don’t want to just look at number of people, because you may have, you know, you may have gone up by five new givers. But if the church also increased by, you know, 100 new people, well, then percentage -wise, you might have actually declined, right? So, you want to make sure you always are tracking percentages.

Dick Hardy 5:35
Right.

Jonathan Hardy 5:37
And then even the people that might be participating in the different initiatives you have, if you have like a missions campaign, a building campaign, those types of things. Tracking those metrics, is also a very helpful thing to do.

Dick Hardy 5:48
Exactly.

Jonathan Hardy 5:49
Well, and then maybe one more thing I might mention, too, is, then you want to track and measure this giving as it relates to the overall budget. And how is the giving, comparing to your budget. And of course, hopefully, you have a budget. And we talk about, a lot about the budget throughout the Church Tips episodes, particularly number seven on how to balance the church budget. But you have to start with making sure you have a budget

Dick Hardy 6:14
Exactly.

Jonathan Hardy 6:15
But then you’re able to start tracking and see, okay, even again, percentage-wise, “How does our giving compare to our expenses? How does our giving compare to where we thought we were going to be at this time of the year?

Dick Hardy 6:26
Exactly. Now, those first couple things, we talked about – attendance and giving. Those are kind of nuts and bolts. It’s not hard to conceptualize. These next two, you could sit and say, “How? I don’t know how exactly to measure it.” The one I want to talk to you about is measuring discipleship. And you say, “Well, how do I really determine you know, how a person is moving forward in their faith?” And we’re going to quantify a few things here for you.

Dick Hardy 6:52
Now quantifying these things doesn’t absolutely guarantee that a person is moving through. But it can be a barometer that begins to tell the church, are you making progress. The number of small groups or classes you have, numbers of opportunities that people have to participate in discipleship, participate in growth of their faith. The number of small group or class leaders, you know, if you’re increasing the number of leaders that you have for small groups, you are setting the stage for greater development to happen in those classes.

Total number of volunteers, okay, we got a buddy of ours, friends of both of ours, Chris, who just says, “You get more volunteers, you will grow.” And the more your church can grow the volunteer base, the more that people are being discipled in their faith, because they know they need to give back to the church. Participation in missions outreaches, you know, if last year you did two missions outreaches, and this year, you’re doing one, you’re probably going the wrong direction.

Last year, you did two, this year you’re doing five, then you’re going the right direction. You’re giving more opportunity for people to express their faith in the missions opportunities. And then, you really want to just measure your guests count, moving all the way to being a fully engaged partner or volunteer in the church. Because if you constantly are getting guests in, but these people never move to starting to get involved get into, what do you call your new people’s parties?

Jonathan Hardy 8:29
Well, the welcome party is what we call it, but newcomers dinner, or whatever you call it, yeah.

Dick Hardy 8:31
Or moving to say I might be interested in getting, becoming a volunteer. If they’re not moving, they’re not growing in their faith. The point is, there are ways to measure discipleship, and this is just kind of a quick starter kit on how you would measure discipleship.

Jonathan Hardy 8:46
And what I like about what you’re saying is, and maybe the way I picture it, as you’re talking, is thinking through all the different stages of discipleship. So, if you’ve got that mapped out, and you know, okay, from guest to fully committed believer in the Lord. What are the steps that we as a church are taking to make that happen? And so then, on step, what I’m calling step one, you said, you know, whether that’s the welcome party or something for visitors or whatever.

And then all the way to participation in different things or serving in ministry. If you’re measuring all of those, then you’re able to see, okay, are these things slowly growing? Or vice versa? And again, going based on percentages, you know,

Dick Hardy 9:01
That’s, that’s going to give you a measure for it.

Jonathan Hardy 9:28
Yeah. The final thing we want to mention is prayer. And you might immediately think, Well, how do you measure that? Well, and some of this, you probably could wrap up into what we talked about under attendance. But we kind of put it under this category because, you know, we need to be measuring the prayer opportunities, the attendance of people in corporate prayer, in corporate prayer settings that you have. We talked about corporate prayer, in episode number 22 about why corporate prayer is critical for the church to grow.

And so, you want to make sure to check that out.

Jonathan Hardy 10:03
But in it, you know, we need to have regular opportunities for corporate prayer. And so we’re checking, you know, is their attendance? How’s the attendance looking? What kind of involvement and participation are we seeing in there? Is that participation increasing over the last time and doing the same rolling average type thing. You could do that, if you’re constantly measuring these opportunities. And maybe you can have monthly prayer opportunities.

Jonathan Hardy 10:28
Or maybe have a couple times a year where you’re doing annual prayer, or, you know, quarterly or something, prayer and fasting, those things. And what kind of participation are you seeing, and those things. Those are other ways where you can start tracking. And they’re going to be helpful. It doesn’t necessarily mean, you know, every person is praying in each of these events or whatever. But it just kind of gives you an idea of the participation.

Dick Hardy 10:52
And I would say to that point, Jonathan, for a pastor who says, “Ah, you know, just because I’m getting more people showing up, doesn’t mean.” Well, think of it in the reverse. Ask yourself how you would feel if your prayer gatherings are drawing fewer and fewer and fewer people?” Would you say to yourself, “Oh, Wow! Our discipleship and prayer is growing?” No, you’d probably say, “No, we’ve got some work to do here.”

Dick Hardy 10:52
So, measuring the kinds of things Johnathan has talked about in prayer, is the closest method that you can come up with to help really determine, Is prayer growing at your church? So, let me let me give you a a summary of what we just talked about here. You want to be measuring attendance, giving, discipleship and prayer?

Jonathan Hardy 11:45
Yeah.

Dick Hardy 11:45
And again, to the point we both mentioned, you want to be doing a 52-week average on all those numbers to help give you, it gives you a trend line. And you want that trend line to be generally going up like that, as opposed to generally going. But the point is, you need to know the trend line.

Jonathan Hardy 12:00
Right.

Dick Hardy 12:00
And the 52 week average will help get you there. So, anyway, I want to mention to you again, we referenced earlier, that Church Marketing University is closing tomorrow night. Ryan opens Church Marketing University up twice a year. So, he did a spring launch and he’s done a fall launch and then we’ll close October 15th at midnight. I believe it’s at midnight.

Dick Hardy 12:23
So, go to leaders.church/CMU, again, by tomorrow night, and just take a look. I’m just telling you, friends, you go in there, kick the tires, look at it. And you’re gonna be amazed at what Church Marketing University offers for you and your church. And they’re gonna be talking about things in similar veins as what we’re talking about, measuring, metrics and so on. But it’d be a great opportunity. It closes tomorrow night at midnight. Anything else?

Jonathan Hardy 12:50
That’s it. We just want to thank you so much for being with us today. And we’ll look forward to seeing you next time. Take care.

Jonathan Hardy 12:56
Hey, Jonathan here real quick before you go. Everything in your ministry rises and falls upon your leadership. So investing in your leadership is essential to staying healthy and growing the ministry. And that’s why I want to invite you to join us inside the leaders.church membership. This online streaming service for pastors gives you access to more than 300 videos plus training material to level up your leadership and improve your ministry skills.

Jonathan Hardy 13:16
If you’d like to do that I want to invite you to go to leaders.church/boost. Again, that’s leaders.church/boost. Well, thanks again for joining us on the Church Tips podcast. We’ll look forward to seeing you next time.

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