Effort…or Results?
At Connexus, like at many North Point Strategic Partnerships, we relentlessly ask this question: how do we know we're winning? It's another way of saying 'how do we know we're accomplishing our mission?
That's a very different question than "are we growing?" or "are we meeting budget?" or "do we like what we're doing?" (three easy questions to ask).
Primarily we ask these three questions:
- Are we creating a church unchurched people love to attend?
- Are we leading people into a growing relationship with Jesus Christ?
- Are we helping parents and families win at home?
The first answers our vision statement, the second, our mission statement and the third, our family ministry philosophy.
But I find as a leader I am tempted to dump these questions in favour of this question: Did I try really hard? I find this to be true: the more I invest in a message/series/project/venture the more likely I'm going to declare it a win whether it's a win or not.
I am constantly tempted to measure organizational success by effort rather than results. I think it's one of the key ways organizations get off track. It's how 50 very sincere Christians can end up building a church no one but them wants to attend. It's how artists produce music no one wants to listen to or preachers pour their hearts in messages that have little relevance. It's how a great organization can become a once-great organization.
Our entire team can work relentlessly hard on a project, but if we fail to reach unchurched people, don't help people grow in their relationship with Christ or avoid helping families win at home, we're engaged in a heartfelt exercise in missing the point. That's not why we started the church. It's not why we exist.
As we plan for 2010, we are focusing increasingly on measuring outcomes. As I regularly share with our staff, staff spend 99% of their time planning for ministry and 1% evaluating ministry. The congregation and community do exactly the opposite - they spend 1% of their time planning and 99% of their time evaluating.
How about you? Do you find it easy to keep focus? What helps you stay focused? How do you measure what really matters most?
Carey – we were having a staff discussion today around some issues similar to this. Your blog post is timely – one of the questions that came up was “How do we measure a ‘win’ in family ministry? What is the scorecard we use when it comes to marriages and parenting?”
It seems like a simple question with lots of possible answers (devotions at home, kids coming to faith, marriage relationships restored, etc etc) but if we zoom out a little bit, don’t we have to say that the ‘win’ for family ministry isn’t something we can measure on a monthly or annual basis? Isn’t the win for family ministry something that we’ll really only be able to see after 10, 15, 20 years when we’ve had an entire generation of parents and children growing with this understanding of the home as the most significant place for spiritual development?
I’d love to hear your thoughts.
Chris…you are right about a long term view in family ministry. The real test is in some measure what’s happening at 25 years old, not just 5 years old.
That said, we believe that there are checkpoints along the way that can help us assess whether we are setting up kids and families to win.
Some key questions we ask:
- Do parents have resources they need to leverage the 3000 hours of influence they get with their kids each year? Are we setting them up to win? We send home Parent Fuel packs every month and deliver a monthly podcast to parents based on the five parenting values I taught back in February – March in our Orange Family series.
- Does every child have another voice building into their lives saying the same thing a good parent would say? For us, that’s a small group leader…a high quality small group leader?
- When a child reaches the junior high years, are they starting to serve? We think one key marker in helping a child make his or her faith personal is serving through their teen years. A student won’t believe they are significant until you give them something significant to do.
There are other checkpoints we use to: a specific curriculum, great Sunday environments, and even the foyer – living room – kitchen strategy for kids and students that help along the way.
All of these simply move toward one end – we can’t guarantee that a student embraces faith personally, but we can set up optimal conditions in which that can happen. We can set the table, we just can’t make people eat. But we want to do the best job we possibly can setting the table and making the food as appetizing as possible.