What is your church measuring? What does that say about your mission?

Edgar Schein, Professor of Management at MIT, says that whatever an organization measures and how it measures it becomes its de facto culture.

Churches and ministry organizations write mission statements that sound good on paper. But these only articulate wishful thinking if the way they measure success is contrary to those lofty mission statements.

For instance, a random church’s mission statement I grabbed from the internet reads,

“Our church seeks to make disciples for our Lord Jesus Christ through Christ-centered worship, Bible-centered spiritual growth, and evangelistic service.” 

Okay. That sounds pretty good to me.

How do you measure that? Think for a few moments on that…

How do you measure that?

The most widely used tools for measuring success, according to Thom Rainer and Ed Stetzer, are  “bodies, budget, and buildings,” in other words, how many people attend on Sunday, how much is collected in the offering, and how large the church facilities are (see Rainer and Stetzer’s Transformational Church: Creating a New Scorecard for Congregations)

However, if these are our primary measuring tools, our mission should actually be changed to this:

“Our church seeks to get as many people as possible to commit to attending our Sunday morning worship services and tithing.”

Hmmm…

Is that a good mission statement? How does that align with God’s mission in the world?

As I’ve said before, the mission that God has sent us on is not to attract people into the church. No, the goal is to send people into the culture as incarnational “little versions of Jesus” invading every institution and sphere as God’s instrument for bringing all things under the Lordship of Christ and His Kingdom.

How do you measure that?