Your Congregation’s Dashboard
If you were a Methodist Church in North Alabama, those words would have already brought a strong reaction, pro or con. For it is there in the North Alabama Conference that Methodist Bishop and noted preacher Will Willimon Pictured below) has created an accountability experiment of unprecedented scope. Every church in his conference reports on key statistics every week. Then those statistics are reported every week for the whole world to see and ponder.
The dashboard is online here North Alabama UMC Dashboard with its count of membership, attendance, baptisms, professions of faith, people serving, people served, apportionments paid, and a ratio of attendance to membership. Then you see charts of churches with the biggest membership gain, the most baptisms, professions of faith and so on.
This experiment started in 2009. Since then, every congregaton in the conference logs on every Monday to fill in a report which goes live with the latest data. Within the Methodist Church their General Council on Finance and Administration has created a program VitalSigns which generates dashboards and they are working to get every conference to take that approach.
At the Church Leadership Conference I helped lead this past weekend at Kanuga, keynote speaker Reggie McNeal emphasized that what we count and celebrate matters. In The Episcopal Church it is Parochial Report time and we make the most out of numbers in worship (Average Sunday Attendance), numbers of baptisms, and the income and expenses of the budget. But we never ask how many people served others and how many the congregation served. While we ask about baptisms and adult baptisms, we do not refer to professions of faith. But if we are all about changing lives for the better and going out to love and serve the Lord, then perhaps we should find better metrics than mere the number of noses in the nave or dollars in the plate.
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The dashboard model put forward in North Alabama is controversial. Many say that the focus on numbers takes the focus off people and ministry. This article at the UM Portal helps capture sentiment in that denomination: http://www.umportal.org/article.asp?id=7913
I do see problems with this approach, but benefits as well if there are some tweaks made to it. First, I am not advocating this as a diocesan wide program, but do think vestries need to watch the numbers. Over the next two weeks, I will share what I think are the flaws in this system and how a congregation can benefit from the pros of watching numbers while avoiding most or all of the pitfalls.
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue
Canon to the Ordinary
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