Measuring ministry effectiveness

It may be impossible for us to tell the secrets of people’s hearts, but it really is possible to know whether the people in church congregations are truly growing more in love with God and extending that love to other people, according to Greg Hawkins and Cally Parkinson in their book Move: What 1000 Churches Reveal About Spiritual Growth. The book describes findings from surveys which probe much more deeply than the typical “number of attenders”, “number of baptisms”, and “number of participants in small groups” figures which are traditionally used to gauge the health of churches.

The “Reveal” surveys used by the authors measure the state of respondents’ spiritual growth by asking questions relating to spiritual beliefs, attitudes, motivations, behaviours and satisfaction. Based on their responses, the respondents from each church can be divided into four groups: Exploring Christ, Growing in Christ, Close to Christ, and Christ-Centred. Some 250,000 people from more than 1,000 churches have taken the survey, and the results allow the authors to draw some interesting inferences about the catalysts which move people in their spiritual journeys from one group to the next, and about barriers to growth and how to overcome them, and about what steps church leaders can take to help the spiritual growth process.

I recommend that church leaders get a copy of the book and study carefully the various catalysts of spiritual growth at each stage of the journey. The catalysts for growth from “Exploring Christ” to “Growing in Christ” are different from those for growth from “Growing in Christ” to “Close to Christ”, and these are different again from those for growth from “Close to Christ” to “Christ-Centred”. Apart from these catalysts, the authors identified some actions taken by churches which had markedly higher-than-average results in the surveys:

• Get people moving, by having a clear pathway for people on their spiritual journeys.
• Embed the Bible in everything the church does.
• Create ownership by inspiring people to adopt the vision of the church as part of their identity.
• Pastor the local community by taking responsibility for addressing local community needs.

Interestingly, the churches with the best results in the surveys ranged in size from small to very large. Some were predominantly white, some predominantly African-American, and some were multicultural. Very few of the pastors of those churches are famous, and most seemed surprised to discover that their churches ranked well above the average for spiritual growth.

Many church leaders will have spent years wondering how they can most effectively help people grow into fully committed disciples of Jesus. This book is likely to become a key reference because it provides some credible answers for that question.