Changing how we count what matters in church

 Every year denominations ask their churches to send in an annual report that will show how the church is doing. Questions usually revolve around average church attendance, Sunday school attendance, financial information and other things that are easy to count. The report will also ask for information on the pastor and other staff in the church. One year our church clerk came to me frustrated because there wasn't a place on the report for a bivocational pastor. She asked if she should put down that I was part-time, full-time or just what did I consider myself to be. I responded that I was a full-time bivocational pastor. She said there isn't an option for that on the report so I told her to put down anything she wanted. The fact is, most denominations do not have a good way to know how many bivocational pastors they have.

One of the problems with these reports is that they ask the wrong questions. Counting noses and nickels is not always the best way to identify the health of a church. With that mentality, the more noses and nickels you have to report the better the church is, and that is not always the case. This doesn't mean noses and nickels are not important. The noses represent people for whom Christ died, and more nickels often opens up more ministry opportunities.

What if the questions focused more on the development of people than questions about the institution? What if they asked how God was at work in the church the past year? What if they asked how many people felt like they had grown spiritually in the past year? What if they asked how many people were involved in ministry the past year, not serving on committees and boards, but actually involved in doing ministry in the community? Yes, these types of questions are harder to quantify than the others, but would they not better reflect the ministry of the church? Would they not better reflect the health of the church?

I have to admit that I am not hopeful that many denominations will change their annual reports to reflect these types of questions. It's easier to produce spreadsheets that just reflect numbers than to do the difficult work of interpreting the questions I suggested. But, pastors and church leaders can ask these questions of the churches they serve and make changes in their ministries that will increase the spiritual growth and development of those they serve. I suspect that growth will also result in the church seeing numerical growth as well.