Hey Friend -

We are back with the third email in this series on the Vitality Matrix. If you missed the past two, you can get the archives here.

​Is My Church Healthy? | part 1​
​How Healthy Are Your Relationships? | part 2​

Today, we are talking about the 2nd category in the vitality matrix.

Objective Metric Measurements

Category 2 in the Vitality Matrix sounds tedious.

Or boring.

You can say boring.

However, it's crucial to grasp objective metrics when assessing growth. This is vital when stability is at stake.

I’ve told this story before, but it is a great example of a time I saw how great metric measurements can help anyone understand what is happening.

It was 2013 and I was at my first appointment in the United Methodist Church. I was serving a medium-sized church with a traditional and contemporary congregation. We had two different traditional services, with 3 total each Sunday morning. In the mainline, especially then, contemporary services were usually led by associate pastors in different worship spaces. In many ways, they were separate congregations.

Things could get a bit hairy.

In our situation, the contemporary service had grown from around 60 to around 130 in the last year, while the traditional service had slowly begun shrinking from around 180 to 150 or so. This troubled some members. People were leaving traditional congregations for contemporary ones.

Remember when I said this can get hairy?

We also had a few new folks join, but not enough to really explain the growth in contemporary from 60 to 130. Luckily this church had a great culture of signing in to worship. Our fantastic membership secretary started a spreadsheet of everyone who attended both services in the last few months.

I remember when she stepped into my office a week and said “I think I have the attendance issue figured out.”

No one had left their service. The families I knew had joined were the only regular new people in contemporary. What accounted for both the rise and the decline of the services was the change in attendance frequency. Contemporary services had higher attendance frequency, especially among younger families. However, attendance frequency at the traditional service had declined.

This was easy to figure out because we had solid, objective data already.

Objective data is something we can identify as fact.

Attendance in worship or discipleship (with names and exact numbers).

Number of giving units.

Number of people volunteering or serving in the ministry of the church.

I like to use the language of “active adults” in church. In my last full-time role, we defined this by 4 different means.

• Signed in for worship 1x over the last 4 weeks.
• Attended a discipleship class 1x in the last 4 weeks.
• Served or volunteered in some ministry of the church 1x in the last 4 weeks.
• Part of a household that gave in the last 4 weeks.

When you hear me say many churches are at least 30% larger than their current average worship attendance, this is how I like to get that figure.

Often, the only thing it costs to keep these figures is time and the cost of the paper you might use for sign-in sheets.

A modern church database, like Planning Center, is a great tool. It can replace a sign-in sheet. It can also create lists of names and numbers for you. You'll have them almost instantly. I also recommend the free tool Church Metrics for keeping up with Sunday morning worship attendance.

Here is where the idea of objective metrics shakes out in the vitality matrix.

Unstable Churches

These churches don’t have a clear picture of who is actually “in” the church. The active adult number isn’t known and many times they aren’t even keeping a solid record of attendance each Sunday. It is just a guess, or they do a count when they feel like it.

Stable Churches

Identifies and counts for basic metrics (attendance, giving, serving, discipling). They keep these numbers, but might not talk about it in leadership meetings and don’t know how to strategically use the information.

Vital Churches

Consistent increase in objective metrics. Vital churches know their metrics. They use them to strategize. They also plan to boost engagement and attendance. These are key to church health. This is especially healthy when setting goals for adult discipleship and age-based ministry.

Sustainable Churches

Discerns new metrics to increase ministry capacity. It's vital to know when ministries might reach their facility limits. We must plan for future needs or expansions.

I like to keep track of these metrics using not just numbers, but percentages based on Sunday average attendance.

Here is an example of what I would call a healthy normal - sized church in the vital category

Sunday AWA = 90
Active Adults = 135 (150%)
Total Youth Involved = 12 (18%)
Total Kids Involved = 14 (23%)
Total Discipleship = 35 (54%)
Total Serving = 30 (46%)
Adults in a Giving Household = 80 (123%)

Imagine tracking those numbers monthly, and understanding goals are set by the percentages. All of them are figured off the AWA.

To close, objective metrics also allow the subjective to not enter the room. I find this is often the case with struggling churches. Anxiety creeps in, and with that is the anxious person. Here’s a quote in favor of objective metrics that makes this point clear.

It’s from Claire Johnson, a leader at a company named Stripe, in her book “Scaling People.”

Churches who are struggling to find stability can’t afford to not look at objective metrics as part of their strategic process. They clarify the current reality, and give leadership the handholds to carve out a path forward.

If you want to get the whole vitality matrix in a single sheet, you can download it here.
​Individual Areas of Congregational Vitality.pdf​

Next email we are back with the third category in the Vitality Matrix Financial Health.

Chad