Measuring Growth

Most Church leaders I know (and I include myself in this) have a major obsession and that is the number of bums on pews on a sunday morning. There is a very good reason for this, how else is a church leader going to know if they are being 'successful'. Things like bums on pews and also how much money is given every week are one of the few things we can measure as church leaders. We all know that numbers on a sunday are not necessarily the best way of measuring success (Jesus wasn't always very good with numbers!!), but they are one of the few things we can actually measure in Church. I use the word 'success' guardedly because it's not a word that sits easily in the context of Church life. Some people don't like it because it makes the church sound like a business. We could easily use biblical words like fruitful but for now I'll use 'success'.
There's some research come out of Willow Creek Church, and documented in the book 'Reveal', that looks at how we can measure the one thing that needs to be measured in order to gauge 'success' and that is our hearts. After all a truly successful church is one in which all its members are growing in their discipleship. Success is really defined by the christlikeness of our membership but how do you measure that. Wiilow Creek have tried to do that. Drawing on the skills of a top market researcher who specialises in assessing people's attitudes and behaviours to different products, they have tried to assess their church members on how they feel they are growing in the faith. It is a very interesting book that expresses the struggle they had in trying to develop a tool to assess whether people are growing or not. Through the research they make a number of interesting discoveries and were able to create predictive models of how people might feel as they grow in faith.
The interesting thing for me on this is that I have been thinking about how we could develop a questionnaire that helped us to consider whether people felt they were growing in their faith, what they found helped them most in growing and how the church could help them grow. Can it be done, can we really measure people's hearts. I think whatever could be done would only ever give an indication of what was happening in the hearts and lives of church members, but it is certainly better than what we have now in terms of that kind of information which is simply hearsay and intuition. So at the moment I'm slowly working on trying to develop this form. Maybe nothing will come of it but you never know in a few weeks time I might be asking you all to help me measure your heartsand let's see how 'succesful' we really are!