Well, I got a few responses to how to measure success on Facebook. They basically fell into two categories. 1) A church is successful when they make new people feel very welcome. This was best put by someone who said you make them feel like you’ve been waiting for them. 2) Sarcastic comments about measuring based on how big a church is. I kind of did this in the initial post, so they fell along the same lines.
My sense is that most people understand that measuring the success of a church based purely on numbers isn’t a good way to go about it. Pastors and leaders get drawn into the trap of doing this because it’s easy to quantify. I don’t think most pastors really think success is about numbers, but try quantifying discipleship in ten seconds or less.
There are no end to legitimate ways to go about measuring the success of a church because there are quite a few angles from which you can look at discipleship–hours spent serving the community, people studying the Bible, life transformation–and even then there are so many ways to approach each of these things.
When we talk about measuring the success of a church we need to first clarify that we are talking about success in the eyes of God. Sometimes success in the eyes of our culture and the eyes of God are different things. If we’re not after success in God’s eyes that’s a separate problem. But assuming we’re after success in God’s eyes there are some things we can look for. I want to propose what I call: the marks of a great church (in God’s eyes). There are X of these and in the next few weeks I’ll take a look at each and include a metric you can use to measure these things in your church. The marks of a great church are…
- A great church is devoted to prayer.
- A great church moves with God.
- A great church invests in the kingdom of God.
- A great church lives sent.
- A great church loves each other.
- A great church is unified.
- A great church grows in transforming knowledge.
Unique Conformity 