Measuring Success in Ministry
How do you measure success? What is success in ministry? What does that even look like? And by what metrics do we measure such things?
In the congregational setting, it is so often Sunday attendance and offerings. Is that the best way to measure the present reality we are facing.
Have a resource you think we should add? Let us know in the comments ⬇️
Pro Church Tools with Brady Sheerer
Meet Brady Shearer and Pro Church Tools. I’d encourage you to begin following them on your social media channels. Take some time to watch these two YouTube videos as sampling of how you might approach the big question of“measuring success” or “church growth”.
If you are looking for a data dump, here are a few sources to get your fill. I learned more about these organizations and met the lead researchers at the Canadian Church Research Symposium hosted by Wycliffe College just before Christmas 2023.
Faith Communities Today (FACT)
The first one comes from Faith Communities Today or FACT (faithcommunitiestoday.org). This was from a study that was launched at the beginning of COVID-19 and looked at what the markers of spiritually vital congregations are. They continue to conduct their research using US data.
The Hartford Institute for Religion Research
This next one comes from an initiative funded by a Lilley Grant and led by The Hartford Institute for Religion Research and other partners including FACT called Exploring the Pandemic Impact on Congregations or PIC. This too is an American research study but certainly finds many parallels with the Canadian context.
2021 Canadian Census Data on (Non)Religion
And finally, this webinar breaks down the 2021 Canadian Census Data. This comprehensive data set is released every 10 years and offers a reliable measure of trends in the Canadian population, including (non)religious identification. In this webinar, Sarah Wilkins-Laflamme, sociologist and expert on (non)religion from the University of Waterloo, leads an overview of the data. She identifies surprises, reviews results, and answers audience questions.