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Dealing with Difficult People

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Measuring Ministry Effectiveness

Can You? Should You? How?
Greg Hawkins | Outcomes, Nov/Dec 2007, Vol. 31, No. 6

For the past 12 years, I've been fortunate to serve as executive pastor of Willow Creek Church. Whether it's been through our services, welcoming new members, nurturing small groups or serving the poor, I often ask myself, "How can we steward our resources of vision, effort, time, and money, along with the gifts and talents of our people, most efficiently and effectively for God's glory?" The "answers" always come back to this thing called measurement. Ultimately, what God is doing at Willow Creek (and I suspect in and through your organization) has a lot to do with casting vision, moving out in faith, and then at some point, evaluating the results.

Where's the yardstick? Can you measure a ministry's effectiveness? (Yes). Should you? (Yes.) Then, how does a church, regardless of its size, location or sphere, do it? (Keep reading.) One place to begin is with a bite-sized paradox from the late theologian Carl Henry who said measurement is both necessary and insufficient.

He might be right on both counts. Let me explain why by offering three eye-opening truths we've seen in our church.

Believe it or not, for its first 20 years, Willow Creek operated without a strategic plan. That worked fine, because we kept growing, and it wasn't hard to figure out what to do. Then, in the early 1990s, the growth stopped, and it made us rethink where God was directing us. We created some goals and set up a process to measure what we were doing. Every six months, our leadership would measure and evaluate the church through the lens of six key areas—Sunday service attendance, small groups, serving the poor, membership, volunteering and serving other pastors through the Willow Creek Association.

One of the first things we learned was how these six categories gave us an incredibly helpful, common way to talk about our work and communicate with each other. Every six months, each ministry produced a plan about how they were making a contribution to these six areas. These six measurement gauges gave us a way to learn what things were working, what things were not, as well as where and how God was showing up and where he was calling us to do more.

One practical outcome of our commitment to measure ministry outcomes (and there were many along the way), came when we embarked on a major building campaign: The number of volunteers were exploding. We paid attention to this. As our needs and demands grew, and as volunteer readiness and participation remained high, the first question we asked was, "Can we justify paying for someone to do the work a volunteer could do?" Our measurement, evaluation and learning paid off. With the new facility, we needed to serve an increasing number of people—and we did with volunteers. It proved to be very wise stewardship.