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Tags: Brent Dolfo, Leadership Barriers, Serve, Structure
VRcurator
Bob Adams is Auxano's Vision Room Curator. His background includes over 23 years as an associate/executive pastor as well as 8 years as the Lead Consultant for a church design build company. He joined Auxano in 2012.
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Mr. Tony Bowick — 11/08/12 11:47 am
Great report! Well worth downloading. Leadership Network does world class research and thought-leadership.
Three effective ways to start moving toward clarity right now.
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Tags: Externally Focused Church, Kingdom Concept, Leadership Network, Reggie McNeal, Serve, Warren Bird
Warren Bird
Warren Bird, Ph.D., research director at Leadership Network, is a former pastor and seminary professor, and is author or co-author of 24 books for ministry leaders, the most recent one with Jim Tomberlin: Better Together: Making Church Mergers Work. Some of Warren’s recent online reports include “The Heartbeat of Rising Influence Churches,” “Pastors Who Are Shaping the Future” and “A New Decade of Megachurches.” Follow him on Twitter @warrenbird.
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Three effective ways to start moving toward clarity right now.
I want to revisit the five primary spheres of church ministry that leaders should be tracking, quantifying, and measuring. All five areas can and should be covered on a regular basis and in a systematic way. Links are also included to help you unpack how to measure these areas and why it’s important to do so.
1. Discipleship
The greatest Kingdom investment is relationships. Being a good steward of people is what God cares about most. Ask yourself this question to make sure discipleship is a priority: Do you have a process to make sure that first-time guests become attenders, that attenders become members, and that members become involved in real community?
2. Financial
Are you tracking first-time donors? What about one that helps you easily access reports that shows when giving dips? How do you measure the financial health of your church?
3. Engagement
How are you measuring engagement? How can you quantify heart change and authentic community? How can you measure the authentic engagement? There is no one correct answer, but your church should have an answer that fits your unique community.
4. Assimilation
Not every church understands the true value of having a process for assimilation. Your church needs to be able to identify when a person’s involvement in the church community grows or declines. How are you measuring assimilation right now?
5. Overall Growth
Always remember—Numbers reflect lives changed. Kingdom work is the most important work we can apply ourselves to because it is the only work that has eternal implications. There is too much at stake to simply “fly blind” and not be intentional about how we lead the people God has entrusted to us.
Which area of church growth do you find most challenging to measure? What has tracking progress revealed at your church?
Click on the links above to begin a series detailing the 5 areas every church should measure.
Read more from Steve here.
Tags: Measures, Steve Caton, Vision Frame
Steve Caton
Steve Caton is part of the Leadership Team at Church Community Builder. He leverages a unique background in technology, fundraising and church leadership to help local churches decentralize their processes and equip their people to be disciple makers. Steve is a contributing author on a number of websites, including the Vision Room, ChurchTech Today, Innovate for Jesus and the popular Church Community Builder Blog. He also co-wrote the eBook “Getting Disciple Making Right”. While technology is what Steve does on a daily basis, impacting and influencing the local church is what really matters to him……as well as enjoying deep Colorado powder with his wife and two sons!
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Mr. Steven Finkill — 11/05/12 8:21 am
This is one of those ongoing, never finished discussions in the church. What do we measure? How do we measure it? I love that discipleship is the first thing on the list. It's difficult to measure, though. I think if we got better at measuring our success by the right metrics, we would be more effective overall as the Church
Three effective ways to start moving toward clarity right now.
With the increasing use of GPS enabled smart phones and apps like foursquare, social media is attempting to mimic omniscience. We find ourselves in a world where our technology has enabled more meaningful interactions with someone on the other side of the world rather than our next door neighbour.
Whether we like it or not social media will influence the way we do Church both positively and negatively and it is important that as a church, we anticipate and adapt to these changes appropriately.
Now that social media is here to stay, those that see church as primarily their social network may now find that they don’t need church quite so much. Alternatively social media may have little effect on those who experience Church as both spiritual and social.
In the consumer generation, commitment is being eroded and content is fast becoming king. People increasingly are being guided by customer reviews and have the ability to make more choices about the way they live their lives. Is this same consumer mentality being applied to the way we do Church?
Is Church becoming more fluid, with people doing church when it suits them rather than fitting in with existing structure? Could this fluidity cause churches to experience more churn, as people pick and choose when and which meetings they attend? I already know people who are using social media to decide which church meeting to attend? If their favourite speaker or worship leader is not part of the service that day, they may decide to go elsewhere.
In the consumer generation Hebrews 10:24 is interpreted more loosely and in response, the church needs to endorse the concept of being called to a particular church family (James 4:15) rather than allowing people to treat church as a consumer experience.
There was a time when the local Church was able to guard our minds from false doctrine and filter the information that we were subjected to; however that is increasingly no longer the case. We have never before had so much information at our fingertips through social sites, blogs, and on-line magazines. These days due to the web’s low barrier to entry, regardless of their credentials, anyone can publish their ideas.
On a more positive note, is the rise of the ‘social Influencer’ good news for the Church?
It will become increasingly important for Church leadership teams to encourage and mentor their social network entrepreneurs, their influencers and bloggers, and content aggregators. If one of your church members writes a popular blog they are already influencing people on a global scale.
The boundaries between ‘virtual ‘and ‘real in the flesh’ communication will become increasingly blurred as mobile technology and social applications like facebook, twitter and foursquare draw people into more face to face meetings. Will this mean that micro church will happen more spontaneously in the park or culminate as prayers in the coffee house, as technology draws people together through their network of friends?
Social networking will aid in church growth as our influencers use technology in creative ways to convey the gospel message and connect people into family groups.
Good content will become increasingly important.
As the consumer is overloaded with information it is becoming increasingly important for their favourite content to be aggregated into one place. We can already see this happening more and more with sites like Mashable, Pinterest and Delicious becoming more popular. Google no longer just use page rankings to bring you the most relevant content but they now also take into account social influence and relevance. This means that Christian influencers who are able to gather good quality content into their sites will become increasingly popular and influential.
These days it seems like internet gorillas like Google, Facebook and Twitter know you more than you know yourself. Chad Hurley, CEO of Delicious and co-founder of YouTube recently said “As people’s networks and interactions expand, massive data sets will generate predictive models that will know what you want before you look for it.”
Could the prophetic in us, intuitively predict what is about to capture the public’s attention and help inspire good quality content which will re-direct people towards the Gospel?
For the more philosophical, social media could mean more cross-pollination and unity between church groups aspeople attend events organised by other Christians that they discover and connect with on-line. Church leaders could increasingly find themselves communicating and coordinating with their counterparts in other denominations.
Great news for the Christian artist as digital art will become more important. Due to short cybertized attention spans, good quality imagery is needed to capture the attention of the cyber channel clickers.
As one of my friends put it, ‘Social media means church beyond Sunday, and church beyond four walls. Churches should be encouraging a continuing sense of purpose and mission through the embracing of social media.’
In evangelical circles during the last couple of years I have noticed an impetus to empower and mobilize grass roots leaders and influencers. In my denomination they have called this initiative ‘Radical Disciples’.
Combined with the power of social media, never before has the ‘Radical Disciple’ had so much opportunity to influence so many.
Tags: Attention, Phil Petty, Social Media
Phil Petty
I live in Basingstoke, England and am married to the lovely Jane and we have three teenage sons. I work as a researcher for a company involved with mergers and acquisitions. I am addicted to creative writing and I am also the author of Phil Petty DotCom'Truth, Inspiration & Americano'
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Three effective ways to start moving toward clarity right now.
