Tracking Trends in Your Congregation
With the most recent two Loose Canon columns, I have told about the Dashboard initiative within the Methodist Church which started in their North Alabama Conference. Then last week, I pointed out some problems with the downside to watching the numbers week by week. To counter this problem, while using various indicators to keep an eye on the fruit being born by the ministry of your church, I recommend tracking trends over time.
Quarterly and Semi-Annual
In specific, I recommend that you pay no attention to any given week. No church is fully itself on any Sunday and so you shouldn’t get excited about a week of atypically high attendance or offerings, or even two of these in a row. Similarly, you should not concern yourself with one or two low weeks in giving, or attendanc, or whatever else you are tracking. Instead use the trendline option in your spreadseet program (you do keep up with all your key data in Excel or other similar program, right?) to track quarterly and semi-annual trends. These flatten out given Sundays, but still provide an ongoing look at how the ministry is doing in some objective ways. To do this, select trendline, then creating a rolling average across 12 weeks and 26 weeks. When these trends show rising or falling, there is more significance to the data. The trends will still rise with Easter and fall in the summer, but quite gently and the picture they create over time is all the more telling.
Tracking More Trends
Now that you are tracking trends, don’t stop with Average Sunday Attendance and weekly offering, but add the indicators significant to showing the difference your congregation is making. For a church with a feeding program, you can track both meals served and hours of service by volunteers. You can track mid-week participation in all of the church’s activities. The possibilities go on and on and I don’t want to get you so lost in a sea of numbers that you fail to share the love of God with those both in your chuchand those who will likely never darken its doors. Numbers alone will never show vitality. However, numbers do matter as we find that typically when we are faithful, that shows in some ways.
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Beyond Means of Quantifying
The ways most significant to a pastor’s heart will never find a box in a spreadsheet, for their is no real way to numerically track lives changed for the better by the Gospel. The hospital visits that went well and led not to the hoped-for physical healing, but did lead to a person at peace with his or her death and a family gathered lovingly around for that time, will completely elude this tracking of trends. But don’t let these gloriously significant moments which delight the heart of God prevent you from keeping watch over the trends of the congregation where you serve as vestry, vicar or rector.
The Rev. Canon Frank Logue
Canon to the Ordinary
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