Harvard Business Review Considers Church Stats
What measures should guide the management of a church? This is the central question in an article published last week at the Harvard Business Review website. The answer given is not the usual numbers of attendance, membership or giving. Instead, All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, California’s use of data is given as an alternative.
The article author, Zachary First, reports that All Saints has 8,000 members on its rolls, but that they did not just want more numbers. The church’s Rector, the Rev. Ed Bacon (from Jesup, Georgia) told him, “Sure, we love to see big numbers, but what really makes our hearts beat fast is transformed people transforming the world. Membership isn’t our business. Turning the human race into the human family is.”
Guided by this approach, All Saints replaced the question: How do we grow our membership? with a question more focused on the outcome the leadership desired: How do we more deeply engage the people we serve? The size of All Saints made gathering data a little trickier than at a church where the priest and vestry members know all the other members. They began with software to track engagement and weighted some engagement more significant than others.
All Saints’ approach certainly isn’t the only option, but I do like the way they turned typical stats around by asking a different question. Rather than asking how many people are a part of the church, they asked how engaged those attending were and so rather than wondering how to get more bodies, they worked on more fully connecting with the folks already present. The full article is online here: What to measure if you’re mission driven.
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What do you think of the approach? How might you adapt it to your congregation? Asked differently, if we are in the business of changing lives by the power of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, then how is business?
-Frank
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue, Canon to the Ordinary
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