pat loughery

I had a fun conversation today after church with Matt Hayashi about our mutual friend Wayne Park’s recent blog post about measuring success in a church plant. Wayne is asking great questions about the topic; spend some time on his blog looking at recent conversations.

This issue is of course again at play in the blogosphere with recent conversations at Out of Ur about attractional and missional churches, where attractional churches are those who are attracting people into a Sunday gathering and putting most of their energy there; while missional churches are preparing people in their Sunday gathering to be God’s missionaries in everyday life. And there’s a LOT of overlap in these two circles, but if your church’s primary goal is networking together teachers and engineers and parents for the purpose of serving their communities during the week, that’s probably a missional focus; if your church’s primary goal is to have excellent worship and teaching and kids ministry so that you can invite your friends to hear the Gospel presented, that’s attractional.

To those of you who are leading and participating in churches that aren’t measuring success by the old standards: Attendance, Buildings and Cash, or Buildings, Budgets and Butts in Seats, what are you measuring?

How do you know you’re making progress and doing what you’re supposed to be doing?

I’m asking for a specific reason: I think that churches which choose not to prioritize the ABC’s or the BBB’s above have something else in mind, and the communities and their leaders need to know what the aim is because they’re not just counter-America-cultural, but they’re counter-American-church-cultural. And because they’re counter-cultural, they need a countercultural way to tell if they’re doing well or not doing well; healthy or unhealthy; succeeding or failing. As much as we’d like to ‘just BE together’, there’s a reason for us to BE: We are called to participate in God’s work of reconciliation between God and creation, to do justice, to love mercy, to walk humbly with God.

So, as we’re doing these things and being together, where should we aim?

I think we need to develop ways that stories are our success measurements. How can individuals’ stories be told in ways that show God at work? How can individuals’ stories show the community what it means to participate with God? HOw can the community’s story as a whole show its neighborhood what it means that God is Good News? How can our stories be embedded within God’s grander story?

If I were mentoring church planters these days, I’d make them answer this question – how do you measure success? How do you know you’re on the right track, making progress and being faithful to the call that God has on you and yours?

If I were able to suggest dissertation topics to other D. MIn students who were planting communities, I think this one would be meaty, and there’s a lot of missional church planters and pastors who would be blessed by what they found.

For you, reading this, how do you answer this? What markers of progress and success are you using?