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 How Do We Measure a MinistryFinding the real bottom line in ministry.
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One Sunday evening, Jim Edwards, our former minister to young adults, illustrated a sermon point with a story about a hitchhiker. Jim said that when he was a college student making a long drive back to school in the Northwest, he picked up a hobo. As they zoomed along the interstate, the hobo kept seeing things along the shoulder. "Look!" he'd shout. "There's an old coat. Stop so I can pick it up." Next he saw a tire iron, a shoe, and a screwdriver. He had an eagle eye for junk. Jim, however, didn't stop. When the hobo finally got out of the car, he said, "You're sure missing a lot of good stuff along the road." During the rest of his drive, Jim wondered how the man could have seen all those things at freeway speed. He finally concluded that in life you see what you're looking for. I've found his conclusion valid, especially in measuring the results of a ministry or activity at church. If you're like me, you want to see your involvement make a difference. You want to see the ministry become more effective. You want results. But how do you measure results in a largely spiritual enterprise? How do you gauge the effectiveness of, say, a choir or Sunday school class or missions conference? It helps, I've learned, to keep asking, "What are we looking for?" Before we can evaluateAs a member of a committee or a congregation, I cannot evaluate results unless I, along with others, know our intention or goal. In ministry activities, especially, that's sometimes hard to pin down. But until we know what we want to do (what we're looking for), we'll never know how well we've done. In Peter Drucker's classic book The Effective Executive, he tells the story of Theodore Vail, a man whom he calls "the least known of the great American business builders." Vail was president of the Bell Telephone system from just before 1910 until the mid-twenties. Under his leadership, Bell's motto became "Service is our business." This was not a popular approach at the time, when the emphasis was profitability. But Vail was so committed to his approach that, Drucker says, he "saw to it that the yardsticks throughout the system by which managers and their operations were judged measured service fulfillment rather than profit performance." Vail was looking for improved service, so he developed a way to measure service. He knew what he was looking for, and thus, he was able to tell when he had reached it. The bottom line of ministryHow does that translate to the church? What should we look for in our work there? The bottom line of ministry, of course, is people being drawn to Christ and helped to grow in their faith. If we can't see clear evidence of that, other indicators of success are of little value. Not long ago, a man told me the story of his twenty-year walk away from God and his recent turnaround. While he was moving away from God, this man pastored a church for seven years. Under his leadership, the church doubled its membership, tripled its budget, and built a 100,000-square-foot addition. People constantly told him how much they enjoyed his sermons and how well he preached. |             |
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