Which Church Metrics REALLY Matter & Why (For Lead Pastors)
Success in ministry matters. Every church planter or lead pastor cares about it—even if they hesitate to admit it, fearing it might sound “unspiritual.” Yet, we all measure success in some way.
We share attendance numbers from the conference we hosted. We celebrate church growth through new believers or fresh energy experienced a church plant. But here’s the real question: What church metrics truly matter? And how do we avoid misusing the data we collect?
This post dives into the world of church metrics to help you navigate the tension between measurement and mission:
- Popular metrics church leaders use to evaluate success
- Tools to track and interpret data
- Why measurement matters (& where it goes wrong)
- Metrics that matter, according to Scripture
Keep reading to discover how to set metrics that serve your church's mission, not the other way around.
Popular Metrics Church Leaders Use To Evaluate Success
Within churches, growth is often publicly shared and showcased through testimonies: Acts of miraculous faith, servanthood, irrational generosity, fruitfulness, and transformed lives, of course, are the markers of a person’s walk with Jesus.
Yet shoptalk between pastors most often reflects a numbers game:
- What's your weekly attendance?
- How many new members have joined?
- How many decisions for Christ have people made?
- How many baptisms last year?
- What are your tithe and offerings at?
- How many people are participating in small groups?
- What's your volunteer to member ratio?
Are these metrics irrelevant, or meaningless? Of course not... but they could potentially be a distraction from what Jesus wants to do in YOUR heart.
Joshua GOrdo
Back in the 80s, the senior pastor who I was serving at the time carefully tracked how many cassette tapes (remember those?) of his message were purchased each week. For him, success was measured through tape sales! Nowadays, church technology has evolved far beyond that point, and this year boasts an impressive line-up of church technology conferences.
The Best Tools to Track Church Data
If these are the church metrics that matter to you, you can find a whole slew of tools and church management software best practices that'll help you set goals and track your metrics. The advantage of chms software is that it allows you to spend less time managing the data, and more time developing insights so you can make better decisions. Of course, be sure to ensure your church has the basic requirements for a church management software tool.
For many church plants, and church leaders with rapidly changing congregations, understanding what's happening in your church can be very valuable.
With a host of free church management tools available, you can simply and quickly begin collecting rich insights into the behind-the-scenes data of your church. Tracking and evaluating data is a fundamentally important task for most ChMS (church management software) tools.
Here are a handful of ChMS tools worth checking out:
Measuring success: a numbers game
There is nothing intrinsically unspiritual with tracking numbers. Or should I say, there is neither anything spiritual nor unspiritual about analyzing and evaluating performance in relationship to established goals. The science of statistics is used worldwide to track everything from sports to world pandemics in real time. And now, with the help of social media, measuring popularity and success has soared to a new level.
Whether you are selling merchandise, raising money through crowdfunding, developing a church property management strategy, building a YouTube channel, or preaching the gospel, knowing who you are aiming to reach, whether you have reached them, and their response to your message, is vital.
You want to reach the world for Christ. That's one of our two primary mandates from Jesus, The Great Commission and The Great Commandment. As a pastor, you probably meet the group you pastor at least once a week. Many Sunday services are now live-streamed, which has changed everything.
People who would normally “go to church” can stay home; but now anybody who has access to the internet and a link to your livestream can join in, too! As a pastor you're wondering:
- Who are these people?
- How is the outreach of your service affecting or influencing them?
- What decisions and actions are they taking because of it?
Perhaps these are the same questions pastors have always asked; but now, with the help of the internet, your potential to reach people has increased exponentially. Suddenly, there is a real chance for you to make a connection—a touchpoint—with more people than you ever were able to before!
Why Measurement Matters
But back to the numbers game. Putting aside important discussion about KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) we need to measure our performance.
Of course, fear of criticism (and goodness knows, pastors get enough criticism!) can keep you from inviting any kind of feedback. But without a means of measuring performance there is no credible way of knowing, this side of heaven, if your ministry is effective.
Mind you, as I have already said, if you have no clear, well-defined goals to begin with then you really won’t have anything to measure. With no results to measure, then the value of doing (programs, services, and events) is justified by the work you do (time, effort, and resources), rather than the results it brings.
For now, assuming that you have some clear goals in place, some form of measurement is not only helpful, but essential. Effective ministry is the result of clearly articulated goals, strategic planning, activation and empowerment, and then honest evaluation. What makes this spiritual is when we prayerfully seek the heart and mind of God for his purposes to be accomplished through our lives, for the sake of His son, Jesus.
The Misuse Of Church Metrics
So whether you are a pastor or other church leader of a church plant or nonprofit, you will benefit from tracking church metrics. They equip you to improve your church stewardship and make wise decisions.. The challenge with such things, though, is not in the measuring. Rather, it is a problem with ourselves, an issue of identity.
Related Read: Recognizing Problems That Arise In Church Planting
An issue of mistaken identity
Our sense of self-worth is far more dependent on our performance than most of us are comfortable admitting. The outcome is that we are likely to measure our own personal value by what we do rather than who we are. We feel good about ourselves when we are performing well, and bad when we are not. Even worse, we may be tempted to believe that we are better than others who do not perform as well!
Consequently, we look for, even crave for, anything that would indicate that we are doing a good job—a better job—the best job!
When our sense of identity is derived from being loved and accepted based on how we’ve performed, then we live not in the love of Christ but in the fear of man. We might be able to meet up to someone else’s standards for awhile, perhaps, but never God’s!
This is why, before we turn to church metrics to measure our success, we must rest, again, in the reality of the unconditional love of God the Father.
God’s love is not based on our performance but on who we are. Leaning too heavily on the numbers will always lead us astray. The trouble is that the indicators the world looks for are not the same as God’s. Numbers may result in misleading conclusions about our ministry efforts, not because the numbers are wrong, but because of the way we interpret them.
What Metrics Really Matter—And Why
Let’s be honest: According to the world’s measuring stick (particularly in the United States), high-achievers who demonstrate an almost super-human capacity for work are not only rewarded for what they do but are also exalted as models of success.
Again, there is nothing wrong with working hard, just as there is nothing wrong with measuring the fruit of your hard work.
However, when we apply God’s measuring stick to our lives, we find He is looking for something very different. For Him, what matters most is not the numbers but what’s in our hearts.
Scriptural Success Metrics
While we are tempted to simply count fruit, God looks first for its quality! Faithfulness, trust, devotion, sacrifice, servanthood, humility, love—all these characteristics mark us. And though they need to be expressed through action, that is, through what we do (see James 2:20), when they are found in us, as the core of our being in Christ, God is pleased.
So, how do we strike a balance between resting in God’s unconditional love, on the one hand, and the work that He has called us to, on the other?
How do we evaluate our performance, both spiritually speaking and practically?
The balance, I believe, lies between knowing who you are in God’s perfect love in Christ—fully forgiven, fully accepted—and the undeserved calling to serve God on earth so that He might do His heavenly work through you. By faith and in trust, we lay down our work to rest in the confidence of the knowledge that He will accomplish His work through us.
When I was a boy growing up I loved going to the playground.
After the swings, my next favourite equipment was the teeter-totter. To play, you need two willing subjects, one at each end: one to “teet” and the other to “tot”. In the middle was a balancing point. If there was equal weight, with equal exertion at both ends, a well-calibrated instrument would stabilize, becoming still and resting in the balance.
This theory is sound, but remember: Most children want to go up and down, producing endless motion rather than balancing perfectly at rest!
Not surprisingly, knowing who we are in God and doing the work He has called us to is more like the back and forth, up and down of children playing on the teeter-totter than a theology of balance.
What we know and experience in the world in which we live gives constant pushback against who God is and how He works. As an aside, here are some excellent biblical podcasts to keep your focus on your identity in Christ.
Our challenge is to live in a natural world ruled by natural principles and laws, yet operate instead by the rules and principles of the Kingdom of God.
Sometimes these things seem to come into balance and we find harmony in the two realities, but most of the time they just seem to clash. The key is not so much finding a balance between what we know in the natural and what is revealed to us in the Spirit, but rather resting in God between the two.
How the Bible Directs Us to Track Metrics
So where does that leave us? Well, it brings us to a simple conclusion: If you really want to know how you are doing, you might want to think about who you are asking and what your motives are in asking.
Once all the measuring is done and the numbers have been calculated, the results may all be the same, yet the interpretation of those results might lead to different conclusions.
The senior pastor I mentioned who counted the sales of his sermon recordings as an indicator of his success fell into adultery and lost his ministry. He was a great preacher and he did sell a lot of resources; but this was not enough to keep him from unnecessary failure with a catastrophic outcome.
Sometimes we choose to look at the numbers we want to see, at the expense of what God wants to reveal in our hearts.
Remember when Samuel went to Bethlehem to anoint a new king to replace Saul who God had rejected? He was asked to anoint one of Jesse’s sons. We know in hindsight that David was the one who was chosen; but if it had been up to Samuel, he would have picked Eliab.
"So it was, when they (Jesse's sons) came, that he (Samuel), looked at Eliab and said, 'Surely the Lord’s anointed is before Him!'"
When Samuel measured the man standing in front of him, he concluded that this one would be a good candidate to receive a kingly anointing. But the prophet got it wrong. What might have been a real win for Eliab ended up not to be so, because ultimately God's measuring stick was used, rather than man's.
“But the Lord said to Samuel, 'Do not look at his appearance or at his physical stature, because I have refused him. For the Lord does not see as man sees; for man looks at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart'" (1Samuel 6:7).
In the end, Samuel anointed God’s pick: David. That day Samuel, the man, functioned in his calling, fulfilling his prophetic assignment because he acted upon God’s judgment and not his own.
Bottom line?
How God sees and measures can only be known to those to whom He chooses to reveal such things. And so, when it comes to church metrics, let's continue to count, measure, record, analyze, and evaluate church data. Sure, choose interactive church management software (ChMS) with the best functionality for your context.
Don’t forget that what will matter most in your life and ministry is how God measures you and the work you have done in His name.
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