Exponential Conference 2011 #3

Measuring Congregational Vitality:  Somewhere along the line, I developed an interest in statistics… perhaps it came from a statistics course that I had to take at Tabor College in order to get into the Christian Ministries program, or maybe it’s my innate sense of all things mathematical… not!!! At any rate, statistics continue to fascinate me. While statistics are not the end all, be all of adding ultimate understanding to that which they are representing, they do give us a cursory sense of a past or present reality. Regarding congregational vitality, statistics, measurements, and ‘metrics’ give us an interesting perspective on the condition of Kingdom participation. In the United Methodist tradition, we have been required, for eons, to report various statistics that, in some way, are meant to give an idea of individual congregational vitality. The effectiveness of this practice continues to be debated within a wide variety of cult circles inside (and probably outside) of our denomination. Among many things, we report membership, worship attendance, budget size, expenses paid, baptisms, professions of faith, apportionments pledged/paid, ‘money spent on missions,’ etc. Our recent “Call to Action” lifted up several ‘marks’ of vitality:

1. Vital churches offer a variety of worship experiences and styles.
2. Vital churches offer dynamic preaching.
3. Members of vital churches are involved in small groups.
4. Members of vital churches are engaged in their communities and around the world in hands on mission outreach.

I find it interesting that 75% of these ‘marks’ of vitality are inwardly focused… supporting my notion that our primary focus is institutional preservation (which saddens me a bit). Beyond that, “In order to be healthy, the adaptive challenge of the United Methodist Church is to redirect resources to increase the number of vital congregations…” to these four areas:

1. Worship attendance
2. Professions of faith
3. The number of small groups and the number of people participating in small groups
4. The amount of money and number of persons engaged in mission outreach

Again, a bit of an inward focus. I have been consumed recently wondering what would serve as a better indication of congregational vitality… a bit of the answer came from Reggie McNeal during main session number three. One thought that Reggie brought to the surface pointed toward a shift in the metrics we use to measure congregational vitality… rather than the typical metrics mentioned above, McNeal suggested the following “Kingdom Metrics” as a means of measurement…  “a decrease in community crime rates, rising high school graduation rates, a drop in gang violence….” Imagine what our denomination(s) would look like if this were how we were held accountable… how about a few more marks of vitality to choose from that serve as a greater reflection of who we are and the difference we make rather than how big we are… perhaps metrics like local school academic performance on the rise, increase in local green spaces and recycling participation, falling domestic violence rates, a reduction in adolescent and adult drug and alcohol abuse, a falling community poverty rate, a lower number of bullying incidents in the schools, a drop in local the homeless population, and so on… would serve as a better gauge of congregational vitality.

Comments

[Sonya]

Doug and I both noticed the "money spent on mission" piece and thought... wouldn't it make more sense to measure "lives touched by"

[expergolype]

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