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church statistics

7 New Statistics to Help Grow Your Church

tape measureA New Church Tape Measure
How Do We Measure Ministry?

The Old List of Statistics

One of the churches I grew up in had an usher/greeter stationed at the door to the sanctuary. With his right hand he shook the hand of each congregant as he or she entered the door. Behind his back, in his left hand, was a counter. He’d tap the button and tally the attendance. Most people had no idea they were a walk-in statistic.

 

In the same church in the hymnal rack were communion cards. Congregants taking a place at the communion table would drop proof of their presence in the offering plate. These would be forwarded to the church secretary who kept a big book with the name of each church member and their communion history.

 

A third measure is offering history kept as much for tax purposes as pledge purposes.

 

The church governing board will keep track of the income and expenses and asset values. At the end of the year, all of this valuable information will be forwarded to the denominational headquarters.

 

The problem is that this information is helpful mostly to professional leaders, specifically those considering a call. Does this congregation have enough money and a support base to afford pastoral services? is the question on their minds.

 

We are measuring these things out of tradition based on what was practical to measure in years past. A person sitting in the sanctuary is easily counted. A dollar placed in the offering plate can be added to the other dollars and counted.

 

Little of this information is of use to mission planning. It was probably NEVER a measure of true viability.

In Search of More Useful Statistics

If growth and mission are goals, the Church needs to start measuring things that matter—things that were impossible to measure years ago.

 

It is a new world. There are many ways to measure statistics that are far more helpful to mission planning. The more detail you have, the clearer your mission plan will be.

 

Here are statistics that are more important to mission and church growth.

  1. Participation in church activities
    How many attend every niche activity? How many youth take part in youth groups? How many children are in the nursery school? How many helped with the walkathon or mission project? How many attend midweek services or socials?
  2. Where people come from
    Many churches keep statistics on race. They do this a bit apologetically. It’s to measure their progress in fostering diversity, they’ll say. This is not a statistic that really matters. What matters is how do people learn about your church? What is their entry point? Was it a program? Was it through a network of friends or acquaintances? Did they learn about you on your website? Did they read about your project in the news? This type of information tells you which evangelism efforts are effective.
  3. Age demographics
    This information helps you plan a bigger picture. If your congregation is aging, you are going to need to find a way to reach younger demographics. If you are attracting unaccompanied children (common in urban neighborhood churches) you’ll need to plan supervision for their nurturing and involvement, especially reaching the adults in their lives.
  4. Membership cycle
    We are borrowing a concept from marketing. Businesses track how long it takes a person who expresses interest in a service or project to actually make a purchase? It is called the “sales cycle” and is often depicted as a funnel. You place all your prospective customers at the top and widest part of the funnel. Then you track their engagement as they filter through the ever-narrowing channel that leads to their conversion. If they drop out of the funnel before reaching the bottom, sales people want to know why. At the bottom of the funnel are the prospects who actually buy and hopefully form a brand loyalty. It’s called conversion. Conversion: one of those marketing words that evangelists share!
    The same process is vital to successful mission. How long does it take a visitor to your church to become engaged and join? What happened on their journey through the “membership funnel”? Why did some drop out? At what point did they lose interest? How can you improve the experience for other visitors?
  5. Ongoing engagement or member retention
    It is not unusual for an excited new church member to suddenly disappear or slowly become less engaged. Often, they don’t quit or transfer; they just stop showing up. Do you have a way of tracking this and addressing any problems. Their waning engagement could be demands or problems in their personal life—or they might have felt snubbed. If you don’t know, you can’t help them—and that’s the ongoing part of mission.
  6. Member interests, problems and goals
    The church has a tendency to pigeon-hole members. We encourage youth, but once you reach maturity, you are what you are. This has changed. We have reached an age of life-long learning. People are expected to retrain constantly. They are not going to feel comfortable participating in the world of church if they cannot grow. Churches must know member interests and provide channels to nurture and use new skills.
  7. Engagement outside of Sunday morning
    Today’s culture makes it impossible for some to attend church on Sunday morning. Some spiritual people have no interest in Sunday morning worship. They may still consider themselves loyal members, and they may have valuable skills that you need.

How can churches measure all of this?

It’s easier than it might seem.

 

A church BLOG provides these statistics—all built into the software. It takes some skill to offer the kinds of content that promote engagement that will give the best results, but within a year or two you’ll have a new picture of your congregation that will help you plan and carry out your mission.

  • You’ll be able to count views.
  • You’ll be able to see what pages attract the most interest.
  • You’ll be able to track whether they reached you through Facebook or what words they plugged into their search engine to find you.
  • You’ll be able to communicate directly with anyone who subscribes.
  • You’ll be able to see which days of the week and hours of the day get the most traffic. No need to schedule everything on Sunday morning.
  • You’ll get an idea of where people are from. It might surprise you to find that you might be engaging with people all over the world.
  • You’ll be able to track when people unsubscribe and that information can influence your mission.
  • You’ll be able to see skills and interests in profiles which they choose to make available online.
  • You’ll be able to plan educational offerings that connect with your readers.
  • You’ll be giving them a safe place to explore their relationship with God and his people.

 

If a congregation tracks these kinds of things and looks at weekly progress, they will be less likely to wallow in the status quo.

 

In addition, the blog is living evidence of your commitment to your community. You have a platform that is not defined by your church walls. You can use that platform to address neighborhood interests. You are no longer waiting for people to come to you; you are going to them. It’s the kind of social proof that younger generations expect.

 

Yet practically NO churches have a blog.

 

How do you account for that?

photo credit: Vanessa (EY) via photopin cc
13 Feb 2014

How does a church measure success?

This is an important question. We’ve addressed it before, but the answers keep changing. The answers of 20 years ago will not be the answers of the next 20 years. The answers this year may not be the answers of next year.

Old answers address old concerns. Here are some old answers.

A successful church has

  • a membership of at least 150 adults.
  • supports a budget of $150,000 with offerings.
  • has a settled, full-time pastor that intends to stay for more than seven years.
  • can boast of no conflict.
  • contributes 10% or at least $15,000 to the regional body each year.
  • supports at least three part-time auxiliary staff (sexton, secretary, and organist).
  • has a weekly worship service that one-third of the members attend regularly. That translates to a weekly attendance of at least 50.
  • has a Sunday School for children 3-11 and an adult forum.
  • has a five-day Vacation Bible School.
  • accepts 20 new members a year.

These old measures allow for a status quo existence. 

A traditional church can be criticized if their members do not live within five miles. It’s a sign that the church membership has left the neighborhood and can signal the regional office that the church is ripe for takeover. They equate “scattered” with “diminished.”

Geography is not that important anymore. Even our bishop travels about 20 miles to the church she chose to join!

At times the church sets goals for us. One such goal is diversity. Despite the emphasis on inclusion, the church has been largely unable to achieve diversity in the congregational setting. The answer has been to set up separate but equal worship venues. Two or three populations worship at separate times in the same building or are encouraged to serve others like them in their separate location. These multiple communities can worship in the same building for years and know nothing of the “others.” This is playing at diversity. It helps provide some statistics so that it looks like goals are being achieved while congregations remain comfortably homogenous. Homogenous congregations face fewer faith challenges and are more likely to contribute more.

Settled pastors with settled congregations are the goals. So the value of these statistics is rarely challenged. 

Why is this the goal?  Without this financial foundation of the pooled resources of “settled” churches, the hierarchy will fail.

This archaic way of defining and promoting diversity eases the comfort of pastors as much as the comfort of parishioners  The pastor of the homogenous congregation feels less challenged when a pastor with different skills serves the diverse congregation. There is peace in the diverse, but divided, kingdom.

This is all preserving the past while feigning innovation.

Here are some statistics that churches should be measuring if they want to survive in the Information Age.

Community Involvement: How many community events did your congregation participate in as a congregation this year?  How many times did you write about this on your blog and link it to local press sites?

Events: How many events in addition to worship did your congregation host? These can be charity events, artistic offerings, workshops, online events. In a diverse world multiple entry points to church life are needed.

Email List: How many people in the community can you reach by email should you want to rally support for a cause? How many on your list are members? How many are nonmembers?

Many churches used to remove nonmembers from mailing lists to save print and postage. This reinforced the thinking that evangelism is communicating only with people you know.

Since email costs practically nothing, this thinking (which was frugal but unwise) needs to change. Grow that email list!

Website and Blog: Do you have a web site with a blog attached? How many times a week do you post? How many people in your church are involved in the web site? How do you promote your posts to build your online witness? Are your subscriptions growing? Are you getting online feedback?

Collect Statistics: In the old days, an usher stood at the back or the church and clicked a counter as people walked through the door. That worship attendance statistic was all important.

That statistic is fairly useless today. There are so many other ways to measure involvement and provide ways to contribute.

How has your website grown this year? It should grow at least 15% every year. (2×2 doubled its readership in its second year and is on track to quadruple it second year statistics this third year.) Web sites with blogs are easy to measure. You can measure reach, numbers of readers and time spent on the site. This information will help you plan your ministry offline. 

How are you enriching your members’ lives? How are you providing a faith-building environment that involves life-long learning? How are members able to express their faith?

These are some of the measures of the emerging church. They used to be difficult to measure. Not anymore!

The new successful church may look more like this:

  • has a local membership of 20.
  • has an email  list of 6000.
  • has a budget of $12,000.
  • uses the legacy of property to fund ministry (if the regional body hasn’t seized it for themselves).
  • meets in homes or rented or borrowed space.
  • has no single pastor but many contributing clergy.
  • addresses conflict and causes regularly.
  • worships locally, acts globally.
  • contributes nothing to regional body because the regional body doesn’t recognize them.
  • provides diverse educational opportunities daily online.
  • is open 24/7.
  • supports mission efforts outside the denomination because they’ve learned about the opportunity and need online.
  • has virtual members and supporters worldwide.

We know this can be done. Redeemer has already proved it.

07 Jun 2013

We’re Not in Kansas Anymore.

ruby slippers

And we may never return.

When Dorothy left home with no particular plan for her future, she ended up visiting the land of Oz. She returned to the world she knew wiser for her visit and assured that the place she called home was heaven on earth. She needed to leave in order to appreciate it.

Not so in the mainline church. Fifty years ago there were six major mainline denominations that accounted for the majority of people who called themselves Protestant Christians. Lutherans were one of the six.

Today these six denominations are in serious decline. Non-denominational churches or smaller denominations have a bigger piece of the Protestant pie. But the pie is being nibbled away.

I’ve been reading the statistical studies of George Barna. His Group did research the scientific way, issuing a report in 2008.

Redeemer’s Ambassadors just started visiting churches of our denomination. Nothing scientific about it. But our findings are empirical. We look up a church on Saturday afternoon and visit on Sunday. We’ve visited close to half the congregations in the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. We’ve found the Barna Group statistics to be true. If anything, they are even more dire today, five years later.

The average age of a mainline pastor in 2008 was 55. We’ve seen only a few younger than that and most are considerably older.

His report talks about today’s short pastoral tenure. Most pastors stay in one parish only about four years. Since the current custom in our denomination is to place an interim pastor for as long as two years when a pastor leaves, there is really no realistic expectation that any pastor will become a “settled” pastor. The key leadership position in most churches is a revolving door. Smaller churches tend to be waiting rooms for pastors hoping for openings in larger congregations with bigger budgets.

We hear pastor after pastor talk about taking the training for serving as an interim. They may soon be the majority! That this is so widespread disproves the tendency of church leaders to blame congregations when tenures are short. The commitment level seems to be low.

Shorter tenures may not be a bad thing.  Society is no longer settled. But how this is to work while maintaining congregational polity and the interest of lay people will be the challenge. Lay leadership is bound to wane when lay Christians provide the continuity in ministry but must exist under synodical scrutiny for an undesignated period of time—every four years. 

This 2008 report reveals that 35% of people attending church are 60-plus. Our experience is that number can be easily doubled. The elderly are the majority in almost every congregation we have visited. Children in worship are rare. Frequently, there are none. Youth are even rarer. Young adults are in the minority.

The report cites the inability of the mainline church to attract racial and ethnic minorities, particularly Hispanic and Asian. Our visits reinforce that finding. In addition, we see very little diversity within congregations. There are just a few that have any measurable diversity. Most are either predominantly black or white—mostly white. Synod Assemblies can crow all they want about diversity. Statistics don’t back it up.

Interestingly, the report points to the quality of leadership as presenting serious challenges. “especially regarding vision, creativity, strategic thinking, and the courage to take risks.” Our experience mirrors and magnifies this finding. Church leadership is in a rut. It cries to the laity to pull them out of the rut, but it gives them no power to do so. In fact, it can be very judgmental, even punitive, towards lay leadership if they attempt differing approaches to ministry. Yet the need for transformation is regularly preached. 

Our visits and experience attest that this is a critical problem and perhaps the biggest threat to the future of the Church. The professional leadership model just isn’t working at any level and is unlikely to change without some major fresh blood. The Church has a hard time generating or recognizing talent that can make a difference. Laity are valued for their support not their talent and initiative. Pastors tend to exist in their own worlds. They are rewarded for being good followers, not leaders.

The report goes on to talk about emerging options for Christians and their greater exposure to different religious expressions as changing the face of the mainline Church.

Perhaps we should have been paying more attention to independent churches and the religious expression of smaller denominations all this time. We might have learned something. We still can.

Perhaps our Oz is a “melting pot” phenomenon. Maybe the lessons we need to learn have something to do with recognizing that we and our neighbors are not who we think we are. Congregants are likely to find this refreshing and exciting. Mainline church structure may find it bewildering and threatening.

But most alarming may be the economic statistics. Those who attend church are less well to do than they used to be. The wealthy have found other, more rewarding places to spend their money.  

The educational level of church leaders has dipped. Salaries have risen.

Offerings have dropped. More than a third of those who attend church do not contribute at all. At the same time church budgets have doubled.

In our experience  the aging of the church-going population has sparked a move by church institutions to corner the market on endowment giving. Seminaries, social service agencies and regional bodies encourage the donors to think of them when planning their estates. Any questions, just call their development officer. Be wined and dined while the papers are drawn up.

Fifty years ago, those bequests might have been designated for the local churches. Small churches don’t have development staff to work with members. In addition, regional bodies are assuming powers to claim gifts bestowed on small congregations. Future gifts are unlikely. People want their money to go where they want it to go! A lot of dollars that could be supporting congregations are disappearing.

We are in the Land of Oz. Are we learning any lessons?

If we can ever return to the health and influence of decades past, what might we do differently?

There’s no place like home.

photo credit: drurydrama (Len Radin) via photopin cc

01 Jun 2013

Small Church vs Large Church — Looks Are Deceiving!

trinity-redeemer

Comparing SEPA’s Largest Congregation
with the Church SEPA Says Doesn’t Exist

What do Trinity, Lansdale, and Redeemer, East Falls, have in common?

We both engage with more than 700 followers each week.

According to Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Trend reports, Trinity, Lansdale, stands alone among Southeastern Pennsylvania churches in numbers. It has nearly 5000 members and an average worship attendance of 725. Most other large churches in SEPA — and there are only a few — average around 400.

Most SEPA churches are much smaller with about 100 or fewer at worship (many much fewer). ELCA Trend  measures only membership, attendance, income and expenses (in various configurations).

There are new statistics that will mean more in the emerging church. Churches don’t have to worry about collecting the data. The internet tracks results for you. This is where Redeemer is breaking ground no other SEPA church seems to be seriously exploring.

Redeemer is no longer listed in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Trend reports, although the congregation never voted to close. We’ll take that up with the ELCA later.

Redeemer was growing quickly although we were still among the SEPA churches with fewer than 50 in average weekly worship attendance—the only engagement most churches measure. The Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod seized Redeemer’s property and locked our doors in 2009—something about inability to fulfill mission. (They approved a $275,000 budget deficit at the same time they claimed our property.)

There was plenty to question at the time, but no one did. There is more to question now!

Redeemer has continued its ministry without our property. There is no rule that a congregation must own property.

Locked out of God’s House in East Falls, we took our ministry online with our blog, 2x2virtualchurch.com. We now have an average weekly following approaching 800 in new traffic and about 150 who subscribe to our site daily. We engage between 1000 and 2000 readers each week.

Redeemer may have the largest engagement of any SEPA congregation! The potential for effective mission is huge.

While the Southeastern Pennsylvania Synod of the ELCA has tenaciously tried to destroy our ministry, we adapted — and grew!

2×2 is written with lay leaders in mind. Our experience as a small church is that lay leaders are the innovators in ministry. Most have part-time pastors. Growing churches is not part-time work. The passion of lay people (an undervalued resource) is keeping many churches going.

Small churches need resources that don’t rely on paid skills.

We had an additional challenge. Redeemer is multicultural and multilingual. No single age group dominates. That means we can’t just turn to a choir or a youth group or a Sunday School class to create interesting activities. We developed materials that could be adapted to any eclectic grouping.

When we still had our building we posted these resources on generic ministry websites.

Two years ago we began posting them on 2×2.

We posted an Easter play Redeemer performed for all East Falls churches in 2009. It was downloaded 300 times last year and 3000 times this year.

This tells us how we can further serve the large audience of small churches. Search engine analysis shows us that people are beginning to find our content by specifically plugging in terms specific to our site (“2×2 Easter play” — not just “Easter play).” Our content is gaining a following.

We post at least two features a week which congregations can adapt. Early in the week we post an object lesson intended for adults based on the week’s lectionary. Mid-week we post an analysis of art that complements the week’s theme. These can be adapted to multimedia presentations that some churches now show before worship (just as Redeemer did). We will continue to build on this foundation.

In addition, we offer our experience in using social media with dozens of how-to posts.

One large church recently wrote to us: “A lot is written about social media and the church, but you are the only church actually doing it.”

In all likelihood, Redeemer has the widest reach of any church in SEPA Synod with followers all over the world. We engage with them one-on-one. We share ministry problems and successes and rely on one another for prayer.

What does this mean for ministry in East Falls? It means our worldwide reach can now benefit our local ministry. We have a new potential source of funding for ministry.

Redeemer always was viable despite SEPA’s self-interested reports. Our day school, locked since SEPA interfered, would be generating upwards of $6000 per month. (That’s nearly $300,000 of squandered potential over the last four years.) The web site could begin to generate several thousand a month within a year of nurturing—plenty of resources to fund a neighborhood ministry without a single coin in an offering plate.

Redeemer has never had more potential.

If mission is the goal in East Falls (and it is definitely our goal) the best potential for ministry is to make peace with the Lutherans who have steadfastly maintained and grown mission during the last six years of conflict. The property should be returned to Redeemer. This would be in keeping with Lutheran polity.

Our journey has been a leap into the future of the church. We could still be a small neighborhood church serving a few, focused on survival and paying a pastor—as is the case of so many small churches.

We’ve learned that it is possible for a small church to grow. We are very aware that 2×2 can grow beyond our own vision.

Meanwhile, the largest church in SEPA and Redeemer, the largest online church, are both fulfilling their mission with impressive results.

God is doing something new at Redeemer, East Falls.

Can you perceive it?

10 Mar 2013

How Do You Measure “Church” in A Digital Age?

The things we measure are not always the things that count.

Churches have vital statistics. Most people in the pew pay little attention to them. Pastors often pay little attention, too. Denominations have a hard time collecting parish data and sometimes they make up their own statistics.

Maybe it’s too depressing. Maybe we measure the wrong things.

Typical parish statistics include:

  • Worship attendance
  • Number of baptized/confirmed members
  • Percentage of members attending worship
  • Number of members involved in Sunday Schools and VBS programs
  • Regular giving by members
  • Endowments and property assets
  • Operating expenses and debt
  • Contributions to benevolence (what the local parish sends to the denomination)
  • Contributions to mission
  • Ethnic and racial makeup of a congregation
Little of this says anything about what a congregation does or is capable of doing in the modern world!

In most congregations, at least in the ELCA, most traditional statistics are dropping dramatically.

Some of these statistics are rather old fashioned.

Once upon a time, a parish had to give money to centralized authority to be dispersed for mission. Today, congregations can and do choose mission efforts in the community and bypass their denominations, which skews that statistic.

Operating expenses assume a pastor’s salary and property as foundational expenses. Neither may be necessary anymore.

There are many other things in a congregation that can be measured (but aren’t) and there are even more things that are difficult to measure.

If we start looking at other sources of data, our view of parish ministry might change.

Internet ministries are very measurable and can be very helpful in directing church ministry. Very few congregations bother or work only half-heartedly in a self-focused way.

2×2 concentrates on internet outreach — and we’ve only begun!

Here are some statistics on our first 10 months of internet ministry.

2×2 published its first post in February 2011. We had practically no traffic for six months. In mid-summer, we began publishing daily and the site has grown since. There was a slight dip at Christmas time but we have already recorded our most traffic ever only four days into 2012, so we expect the statistics to continue to grow — as long as we continue to work at it.

We have recorded 2100 site visits. For the last two months, 2×2 has consistently registered 100-150 views each week. We have about 70 subscribers/followers who receive our posts by email and so are not counted in site visits data. Our average daily on site readership is about 25. So it is fair to say that 2×2 has 100 daily readers.

2×2 has been visited by someone in all but three states with regular viewership in several states. We have viewers around the world with regular readership in several European countries, Canada and Australia.

We can follow our reader’s interests and provide content accordingly. 2×2 readers are most interested in Social Media and the Church and Children’s Sermons. Our articles on Multicultural Ministry were republished by a reader in Texas. The Editorial Calendar we created to correspond to the Lectionary has been downloaded dozens of times.

2×2 has a presence beyond its online ministry that is more difficult to measure (like most ministries), but in 2×2’s case, it is made all the more difficult to measure because the members of 2×2, who are also members of Redeemer, East Falls, have been excommunicated from the ELCA — without discussion or congregational vote — with the denomination claiming our property and financial assets against their own denominational rules.

Imagine what might have been accomplished if our abilities had been measured!

The church needs to take a fresh look at how they measure ministry.

04 Jan 2012