I read a post today from Tim Stevens at LeadingSmart. Great questions for any church to ask. Or any family. Or any individual. How do we measure success?
What Do You Measure? – LeadingSmart
I read a post today from Tim Stevens at LeadingSmart. Great questions for any church to ask. Or any family. Or any individual. How do we measure success?
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Yep, a good question. Don’t know what the answer is, but I recall one day when someone at work asked what church I went to. I told her, “Bethel in Princeton.” She came over and gave me a hug, and said “I love your church because your church loves Jesus” I think that response tells me that Bethel does a good job of sharing the love of Christ, at least according to this person. Can we call that success?
I’ll call that success!
Now how many more can we witness to so that they will say the same?
Our goal is as our mission statement says; to connect people to God for the glory of God. How do we measure that? Some churches measure that by the number of people that they can say they prayed with to receive Christ into their lives. I’m not sure it is that easy. How do we know the hearts of people? Are there more and more that we can bow our heads in prayer with on a moments notice? Do we see demeanors soften and peace on more faces? Praise the Lord, God does know the answers. It ours to do to continue the journey of witnessing to all those we meet in life.
Amen. We also have a second part of our mission: connect people to each other. We could measure things like: how many people are in small groups? How many people who visit our worship service 3 (?) times become a part of a small group? Or join the church? It’s hard to say if we are accomplishing our mission. But it should be fairly easy to see if we’re not!
It may be that the ‘connecting people to eachother’ is a very important part of our ministry. Have we given any consideration to forming ‘connection groups’ within the church?
Just finished reading “The Tangible Kingdom” by Hugh Halter and Matt Smay. The first one-third of the book was old territory, but the final two-thirds were very interesting, challenging, thought-provoking, and to this primarily traditional, western/modern Christian, rather unsettling. In their ‘gatherings’ of believers, the defining factor for success was not large attendance, buildings or big collections, but faithfulness. If I understand the book correctly, ‘faithful’ means staying connected with the group in some way and learning to follow Jesus more closely.
A couple of us are reading the book, and we would love to hear what others have to say about the book “The Tangible Kingdom.” A copy will be available in Bonnie’s office tomorrow, Tuesday March 2nd.
@Betsy – Waanted to mention in my previous post that the idea of ‘connecting’ is essential to the type of gatherings that are written about in The Tangible Kingdom. You might really key into what they are presenting as a way to do church in this day and age.