LIBERTY UNIVERSITY JOHN W. RAWLINGS SCHOOL OF DIVINITY
Is Your Congregation Making an Impact?
CLED 700
A Paper Submitted to
the Faculty of the School of Divinity
in Candidacy for the Degree of
Doctor of Ministry Department of Christian Leadership and Church Ministries
By
Henry Edwin Shikuku
Lynchburg, Virginia
10/2022
Is Your Congregation Making an Impact?
Many congregations are trying to assess their level of health and vitality. Leaders wonder
why some people have returned and reengaged, and others have not. Some congregations did
well in the pandemic, while others seemed to lose all of the air out of their balloons. One large
church pastor said, “I feel like I am leading a very different congregation than the one I was
serving back in 2019.” While COVID still spreads, folks have moved on with their lives. Church is
back in business, but it is still a perplexing time.
Years ago, the number of members was one of the top metrics used to assess a
congregation’s size, health, and vitality. Over time attention shifted to average worship
attendance (especially in Protestant churches). However, even before the pandemic, many
were beginning to question whether average worship attendance was a good indicator of how
many lives had been transformed. Active members attended less often, making attendance
figures less useful.
How to measure a congregation?
The pandemic certainly exacerbated this trend. Now many congregations are seeing in-
person attendance is between one-third and one-half less than in 2019. According to Pew
Research Center, “In July 2020, roughly four months after COVID-19 upended life in America,
13% of U.S. adults reported having attended religious services in person during the previous
month. That figure rose to 17% in March 2021, 26% in September 2021,” and was 27% in March
2022.
In Christianity Today, Kate Shellnutt estimates that “12% of formerly regular churchgoers
say they’re not attending in person or watching online.” It will be interesting to see how data on
in-person and online attendance trend this fall.
All religious organizations want to make a big impact and are pretty good at articulating
that. “Making Disciples of Jesus Christ to Transform the World” is the guiding purpose of my
own United Methodist denomination. Most congregational mission statements express some
variation on “transforming the lives of others.”
Jumping right In
The issue I often see is that pastors and leaders jump right from their mission or impact
statement to picking strategies and programs to fulfill their purpose. The thinking goes
something like this: “We all believe that we are to transform lives through our faith. But to
survive as a congregation we need more young families and children in order. Let’s open up a
nursery to take care of young kids during worship and put a sign out front.” Caring and faithful
members of these churches usually then have no idea why that strategy didn’t work.
In 2014, Gil Rendle took on the challenge of trying to measure congregational vitality in his
book Doing the Math of Mission: Fruits, Faithfulness, and Metrics. The following year, the
Harvard Business Review published “What to Measure if You’re Mission Driven” by Zachary
First. First tells the story of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California, and its efforts to
develop a different set of metrics. Both of these resources talk about the importance of
measuring outcomes to align a congregation with its mission and evaluate success.
Outcomes can be defined as intermediate goals we must achieve in order to fulfill our
purpose of transforming lives. Defining outcomes is a necessary step between articulating our
mission and choosing programmatic strategies. Rendle writes, “an outcome is not for all time
but the necessary next step of development toward the larger dream that God has but which
we cannot yet fulfill.”
Defining outcomes
Jason Saul, in Benchmarking for Nonprofits: How to Measure, Manage, and Improve
Performance, defines an outcome as “a desired change in behavior or condition brought about
by a particular set of activities or processes.” Outcomes must begin with verbs: If our purpose is
to “Raise the Next Generation Together in the Faith,” one of our priority outcomes might be to
“Improve community awareness of our summer youth program.” After clarifying our outcome,
we can begin to figure out how to measure “increased community awareness.”
Saul points out that you can get some clues about your outcomes by evaluating one of your
programs and asking why you do it. Keep asking this question until you arrive at the ultimate
thing you are trying to accomplish. If you notice a big gap between the program and your
mission, you are out of alignment — your program is not getting the results you say you hope
for.
A few months ago, our middle-judicatory staff took a bold step: we stopped requiring
congregations to report weekly metrics. We went one step further and told our churches they
could take a break from denominational reporting altogether. Needless to say, there was
rejoicing across the land! Many of our pastors and churches were already questioning the value
of these metrics.
Then we asked ourselves what we, as a denominational staff team, are trying to
accomplish. What impact do we mean to make? Instead of requiring numbers from our
congregations, we decided to take a good look at ourselves. After we clarified our own desired
impact, we pushed ourselves to ask what changes in our own behavior would be called for if we
were to make that impact.
Looking in the mirror
This was not easy. It pushed us out of our comfort zone. Soon we were forced to
acknowledge an uncomfortable truth: As a middle judicatory, we exist to help congregations
and pastors thrive. But, like many congregations, our pattern over the years has been to make
assumptions about what pastors and congregations need and throw “programming spaghetti”
at the wall to see what sticks. We were not aligned to make the impact we wanted to make. We
had not done the work to clarify our own intermediary steps — defining outcomes and
articulating what we had to measure to determine if we were successful.
This process, called the Success Equation, was developed by Jason Saul of Mission
Measurement, and it came as a revelation to me. Many leaders in religious institutions are not
trained to think in these ways. Most congregations try to figure out how to determine their
impact informally, but we need to learn to do it better so we can communicate the difference
we intend to make, especially to those who support our work financially.
