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Transforming Leaders Initiative: How will we measure success?
As we prepare to launch our Pilot class in Ohio, we have worked to establish healthy measures that will demonstrate the effectiveness of our initiative in moving congregations towards discipleship and mission. Although our work will focus on the Pastoral Leader, the Lay Learning Team and the spouse, we expect this work to create a demonstrable impact in the life of the congregation.
We have wrestled with the question of measuring success for three years. We discovered as we ran our business that the most important elements of success often elude measure. The measures we developed were often proxies, indirect measures since there was no way to directly measure many important phases of business. As the Wall Street meltdown painfully taught us, people often lose sight of the real goal, and just pursue that which can be measured. For example, incentives were often tied to the price of stock. However, that single-minded focus encouraged people to take short cuts, which boosted the stock price short term, but in the end crashed the business.
How do you measure the important things?
For years, I have seen pastors eschew measures of success around the church. “Just adding people doesn’t prove that folks are growing spiritually,” was a common argument. “These megachurches are not spiritually deep.” The common argument was that if you could not measure the right thing, you shouldn’t accept any substitutes. Sadly, the lack of measures and feedback systems let all too many churches drift to mediocrity. People need clarity as to the goal in order to keep themselves on track. If we seek excellence, how will we know if we are getting there?
Although we will tract trends in TLi churches that show up on the annual ELCA congregation report, we wanted to measure more than just growth in average worship attendance, adult baptisms, and giving per worshiper. We want to know if people are moving deeper into discipleship. Are they discerning their gifts, and using them to serve the church and community? Is the missional outreach to the community and world growing? Are people coming to Christ? Are we expanding the kingdom, or just seeing transfer growth? Up until this point, these things have been difficult or impossible to measure.
You can’t measure spiritual growth.
For years, this was the pushback. How do you measure the main thing? How do you measure spiritual growth, and movement towards spiritual maturity? Well, thanks to an incredible investment of time a resources, Willow Creek has come up with an answer to this question. Willow took the courageous step of building a survey process, grounded in the best practices of market research, utilizing recognized experts to create very solid methodology to measure what impact their programs have on growing people to spiritual maturity. The findings have reverberated throughout the American church, as Willow honestly reflected on where they came up short and strategically began to reorient their approach based on what they learned.
Through their Reveal research, they discovered four phases of spiritual growth. Further research determined the catalysts that cause movement towards the next phase of spiritual maturity. Bill Easum just wrote an article on the Reveal findings, looking at things through a mainline denominational lens. The survey reveals the percentage of responders in each of these phases, and gives feedback on the effectiveness of the pastor and leaders as well as the church programs.
TLi partners with Reveal to use the survey with our Pilot class of 18 Ohio Churches
Our board studied the Reveal process as described in the book, Reveal, and the follow up book, Follow Me. We were so impressed with what we saw that Dave Daubert set up a meeting with the Reveal team. Out of that conversation we structured a partnership that will allow the 18 churches in our Pilot class to use the Reveal survey to measure spiritual growth and the effectiveness of the leaders and church programs to move people deeper. These churches will take the survey as they start our learning journey, and do it again to measure movement. The instrument will also serve as a 360 survey for the pastor, since many questions go to the pastoral leadership. This kind of healthy feedback is critical to leadership development.
We are very excited to employ this tool as part of our learning journey. At this point, over 400 churches across the country have taken the survey, and producing over half a million data points. I recently spoke with Molly Juntunen, a staff pastor at Lutheran Church of Hope in W. Des Moines, IA. Athough only 15 years old, this church worships over 6000 on a Sunday (up from 2200 in 2001). They were part of the original Reveal survey group, and found the process very worthwhile.
Peter Geisendorfer-Lindgren, (http://lordoflife.org/) one of our large church partners in Minneapolis, is taking his congregation through the Reveal survey right after Easter. Pat Gilbert, (http://www.kingdom-focus.com/) a church consultant in Minneapolis, is utilizing the Reveal survey with another ELCA congregation in Minnesota as part of a strategic planning process. This very insightful tool is gaining broad acceptance across the mainline churches, and will be a wonderful addition to our measurement toolbox for the TLi church network.
For more information on the Reveal survey, download this file: Download file">Download file
Have you had experience with the Reveal survey? Know of other churches that have used the survey? Please leave a comment and share your experience.
For more information about Transforming Leaders Initiative (TLi), go to the link for newsletter articles or more, and scroll down alphabetically to the bulk of the TLi articles or go to the TLi website.
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