In the healthiest contexts, ministry assessment can be clarifying and affirming. It can shine light on how God is powerfully at work through a program or area of a faith community’s ministry in tangible ways.
But in many faith communities, assessment is telling a discouraging, and incomplete, story of decline. This story can lead to internalized feelings of failure among leaders and volunteers. It can also cause anxiety, dread, stress, freneticism, and hopelessness when a ministry doesn’t measure up to expectations.
In the most unhealthy of contexts — where the lens of scarcity dominates — assessment can cause a leader to question themselves, or even their calling. Is the church growing enough, fast enough? Are we meeting the expectations of people in the pews and our denominational leaders? Am I doing enough? Am I enough?
Feeling a sense of self-doubt, shame, inadequacy, and hopelessness isn’t why anyone says ‘yes’ when God calls them to ministry. Churches running as fast as they can to measure up to outdated metrics often lose sight of their actual mission and slide into survival mode.
If the institutional Church is ready to be honest, we’d admit that the current culture of assessment is broken.
The existing framework for ministry assessment in faith communities throughout North America doesn’t just need a slight adjustment to the paperwork pastors fill out for their denomination. Assessment needs a complete culture change.
Most faith communities assess their ministries by counting things like attendance, financial giving, new members, professions of faith, and buildings. These traditional ways of measuring success rely on transactional metrics that view ministry effectiveness through the lens of transaction. How many people showed up for a ministry program? How many people contributed financially? Is the ministry growing numerically?
Transactional metrics that rely on numbers do tell a faith community something about a ministry’s effectiveness. But they can’t tell the full story of how God is at work in someone’s life or within a community.
More often than leaders and faith communities admit, growth unfolds in quiet ways beneath the surface and takes months or years to become “countable.”
But this incremental transformation still matters deeply to the heart of God, and it should matter to the Church.
Thankfully, faith communities only need to look to Jesus for an example of how to approach ministry and assessment differently. This other way is rooted not in transaction, but in the kinds of transformation that took place in two disciples through their encounter with Jesus on the road to Emmaus.
In Luke 24:13-35, Jesus joined two men as they walked along the road from Jerusalem to Emmaus. Following Jesus’ death and resurrection, the two disciples were grieving and uncertain of how to make sense of the preceding days.
As the men walked, Jesus listened attentively, avoided judgment, and patiently waited for his disciples to recognize him. He offered scriptural references, but mostly he accompanied the disciples as they talked and wrestled with their uncertainty together.
In this story, transformation didn’t happen immediately. Jesus’ disciples were ultimately transformed after a long journey when he was revealed in the “breaking of the bread” (verses 30-31). Jesus did not rush this moment, but patiently guided the disciples toward transformation.
Jesus’ model for ministry was ultimately transformational for the disciples and their community, and it remains a critical model for ministry today.
An overhauled approach to ministry assessment must prioritize transformational metrics, not just transaction. Transformational Metrics illustrate how the Holy Spirit is working in people’s lives to bring about transformations in their head, heart, hands, and throughout the whole community.
These new metrics tell stories of transformation like what Jesus watched unfold on the walk to Emmaus and longs to see in every person’s life.
The Ministry Leadership Center’s new Transformational Ministry Framework offers a research-backed way to measure outcomes related to 24 Signs of Transformation.
The Signs of Transformation go beyond just outcomes that can be counted and include transformations in a ministry participant’s life like:
When a faith community starts to measure growth through the Signs of Transformation instead of just transaction, it totally shifts their perspective on ministry. These transformational metrics tell stories of hope, new life, grace, belonging, purpose, and positive community changes. Those are stories transactional metrics — which often highlight declining numbers — simply can’t reveal.
As a faith community reorients their priorities away from just transactional metrics, ministry possibilities come alive. Hope and new life become the church’s dominant message, not decline.
Leaders experience a renewed sense of purpose. Faith communities grow deeper and become places of true vitality. That’s a transformation God desires to see in the Church. It all starts with the Church faithfully embracing a new approach to assessment.
If you’re ready to think differently about measuring effectiveness in your ministry, schedule a free consultation with our team. We’ll share how we can guide your community through our new resource called the Transformational Ministry Assessment.
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