Peter had a quiet moment alone in his office on the final day of his long pastorate over his church. Preparing for his departure, while ensuring a smooth transition to his replacement’s leadership, had taken months of dedicated work and concentrated attention. But now, when the day had finally come, Peter found a rare moment for reflection. As the afternoon sun, shining through the tall office windows, brightly lit the surface of the office’s small conference table, Peter wondered what it had all meant, all his labors of leadership. Had his pastorate helped the church reach any particular success? Outside the tall office window, Peter could see member vehicles coming and going in the church parking lot, even though it was the middle of the week and the church had no events planned at the time. Perhaps that, Peter thought, was some indication of success. Peter couldn’t recall any dramatic death-bed salvation, miracle healing, or stunning appearance of angels. What Peter could see, though, were long, steady years of fruitful and often joyful church life.
Sacraments
Churches are such caring and concerned communities that their leaders may not often step back to consider their failure or success. Getting perspective on your church’s upward or downward trajectory can be hard when you are constantly in the good fight to sustain and nurture the body. The long view disappears deep in the trenches of the struggle. The small, nearly unnoticed comforts of living within the fellowship don’t stand up declaring their victory. Big wins can be hard to identify, while small losses can seem to mount. Yet then, at a Christmas Eve or Easter service when the sanctuary is full and the whole body has broken out in song, at an Ash Wednesday service when the sanctuary is nearly empty but prayer has saturated the air with the Spirit’s presence, and at the celebration of baptisms, weddings, memorials, and communion, the church declares its victory in full. A church measures its success in the body’s enjoyment and expression of the sacrament of his presence.
Measures
Other measures of success, outside of the sacrament of his presence, can both help and mislead a church. Numbers can make clear and easy measures of success. For instance, by counting members, churches can easily tell when they are growing or shrinking in membership. Membership growth can certainly seem like a strong indicator of success, while membership decline can seem like the opposite. Counting numbers and tracking trends can also be important and helpful for adjusting staffing, ministries, and budgets. Larger or smaller attendance can matter to service planning and scheduling. More or less financial giving can matter to budget adjustments all the way down the line. The number of baptisms, youth confirmations, weddings, and memorials can also be clear and significant measures, as can the attendance in Sunday School and at ministry activities and events. Yet the church is a body, not a commercial or financial organization or industrial production line. Growth in church membership may indicate that the church has abandoned its gospel message for a more-popular secular or pagan stance. Decline in church membership may indicate that church leadership has remained steadfast in biblical commitments in the face of swift and widespread moral decline. Even Christ himself saw many abandon his ministry. Help your church carefully choose its measures of success, especially when the measure involves counting.
Salvation
Effectively sharing the gospel in ways that lead individuals, families, and communities to salvation is at the core of everything a church does. A church can quite reasonably measure its success in the boldness, clarity, and confidence its members express of their need for Christ, loving submission to him, and full and necessary receipt of his mercy and grace. Look for expressions of salvation in everything from the sermons of your church’s pastor to the actions of your church’s ministry leaders and the testimony of your church’s members. Does your church make regular altar calls or equivalents, and regularly see individuals respond? Does your church capture, share, and celebrate accounts of new salvation? Are children of your church’s members remaining faithful or returning to the faith after their sojourns? Help your church witness, affirm, and celebrate the salvation of members, guests, and others whom your church’s ministries reach.
Growth
New birth may come in an instant, but growth in faith may take a lifetime. Christians should continue to grow in faith, knowledge, and relationship with the Lord. Christians are not born mature in faith. Faith can and generally should instead mature, deepen, and ripen throughout one’s life. Your church would do well to aim for and measure success in member growth. Indicators of growth may include newer members and new confessors of the faith becoming gradually more involved in church life and ministries, and gradually taking on teaching and other leadership roles. Look around your church at its elders, ministry leaders, and key volunteers to see if any have grown from immaturity and spare involvement to maturity and leadership in your church. Consider your church’s children’s and youth programs to see if they are advancing participants through grade levels and into confessions and confirmations of faith. Look at scripture studies and other teaching and care ministries to see if they have broad and deep leadership and participation, sustained by widespread growth in faith. Help your church members grow in faith and express their growth, as a reliable measure of church success.
Discipleship
Christ’s Great Commission points the church toward making disciples. New birth in faith, followed by consistent growth in faith, can in time lead to discipleship. Disciples have proven their reliability and worth in ministry. Disciples are members whom the church can trust, appoint, and empower to invite, lead, teach, and share the gospel. Your church’s disciples may be members who chair the governing board, accept positions on the church staff, or go to seminary to pursue the pastorate. Your church’s disciples may be members whom your church sends on mission trips or sends out to plant a new church. Your church’s disciples may also include members who devote long volunteer hours to caring for the church’s elderly and sick, providing infant care or teaching Sunday School every Sunday, serving the community on the church’s behalf, or leading worship week after week. Help your church foster, support, recognize, and send out disciples, as a reliable measure of church success.
Families
Churches can also reliably measure their success in whether they foster and support families of faith. Look around a church with a faithful membership and vibrant ministries, and you’ll generally find families at the core. Indeed, any new pastor or ministry leader at a church quickly realizes that church membership can be a remarkable web of family relationships. Of course, married couples and their children traditionally form foundational family units in a church. But churches often have one family connected to another family by sibling, cousin, and marital relationships. It can take a leader or member years to realize that one member is the brother, sister, aunt, or uncle of another member, and that their two families have long histories and deep connections. Churches aren’t like workplaces or schools, where individuals are the primary social locus, with pretty much every man for himself and woman for herself. In churches, families, not individuals, are often the primary social locus. One doesn’t address a church member without simultaneously addressing the member’s family. The family nature of church isn’t an accident or peculiarity. It is instead an expression and measure of faith. Your church can certainly help single adults, single parents, and the divorced and widowed. But also help your church foster and support families of faith, as a reliable measure of success.
Comfort
You can also reliably measure your church’s success in how it comforts and reassures the grieving. Life can be terribly hard, requiring individuals and families to endure horrible losses of all kinds. Just try to imagine comforting a couple who loses a child, comfort children or youths who lose parents, or comfort a husband who loses a beloved wife or wife who loses her beloved husband. Imagine trying to comfort a youth who suffers sexual abuse or a young adult who suffers dating or domestic violence. Imagine trying to comfort parents whose adult child suffers addiction or commits a crime and suffers long-term imprisonment. Health issues, financial bankruptcy, job loss, and divorce or other family breakups are other hard issues requiring comfort. Yet the promise of faith is that all comes right in the eternal end. Examine your church’s pastoral care, care ministry, and other ministries and groups for evidence of swift, steady, and sure comfort. Help your church pursue comfort for the grieving as a reliable measure of success.
Healing
Your church can also look to the healing of its members as a reliable measure of success. With all of life’s hardships, life still goes on. Members of strong and abiding faith should generally, in time and with the church’s generous comfort and care, find enough healing to move steadily forward. Parents grieving the loss of a child might in time bear another child while caring steadfastly for their other children, as an indicator of healing. Divorced or widowed individuals may soon heal sufficiently to resume healthy social relationships and in time even remarry, with the comfort and generous care of the church. Members suffering health scares may recover, members suffering job loss may regain jobs, families losing a home might soon gain a new home, and couples suffering bankruptcy may in time see their finances restored, all with the comfort and generous care of the church. Look around your church for member accounts of healing, as a reliable measure of your church’s success.
Miracles
It is not too far-fetched to seek evidence of miracles, as a reliable measure of your church’s success. Miracle healing can come in all the ways just suggested in the prior paragraph. Miracles of new or recovered faith can come in all forms, too, from confessions by the very young to confessions just before an elderly individual’s last breath. Miracles can come in the form of financial blessings to the church or its members, material blessings to individuals or families, or moments of extraordinary sensitivity, clarity, or beauty for individuals or groups. Miracles can come in the form of a church body’s recovery from internal division, from facility damage or loss, or from official condemnation. Miracles can also come in dreams, visions, words, and appearances. Look around your church for evidence and accounts of miracles, as a reliable measure for church success.
Presence
As this chapter’s opening paragraph on the sacraments indicated, a church’s success can also come in the frequent experience by church members and guests of the Spirit’s presence. Christian faith is a relationship with Jesus Christ, not merely a formulaic confession or set of beliefs, practices, and disciplines. Your church’s ministries, from worship to teaching, care, service, and recreation, should help members experience God’s presence. You should be able to look around your church to see members experiencing God’s presence and hear their accounts of having done so. Worship at your church should especially help members experience God’s presence. We each experience God in his chosen way and time to present himself to us. A church cannot force or manipulate members and guests to experience God, nor demand and manipulate God to appear. But a church should help members foster in their relationship to Jesus Christ the humility, confession, purity, and intention that God honors and that may clear the path for his presence. Help your church do so, so that it can hear member and guest testimonies to God’s presence.
Fellowship
This guide began with the insight that the church lives and breathes as a body of believers. Fellowship among the body of believers is thus another reliable indicator of church success. When your church has members who know, love, and care for one another as followers born again into relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, your church shows its success. A living church body consumes the bread of Christ and drinks the blood of Christ, in unity among its different members. A living church body also shows the love and speaks the truth of Christ, in unity among its different members. A living church body also regularly gathers in praise and awe of God the Father and Christ the Son, in unity among its different members. Recognize and celebrate your church’s success in these reliable measures. And may God bless your church.
Reflection
Does your church regularly share sacraments of baptism, confession or confirmation, marriage, and communion, as indicators of church success? Do you see frequent evidence of salvation in your church’s ministries? Are members of your church growing in faith, into leadership roles? Does your church have multiple disciples in whom your church can entrust priority faith work? Does your church foster many families of faith? Does your church effectively comfort the hurting? Can you see evidence of healing and recovery among your church’s members? Do your church’s members experience miracles? Do your church’s members and guests sense God’s presence at worship and in other ministries? Does your church sustain a rich fellowship, expressing unity and abiding faith among its members?
Key Points
Experience of God in the sacraments reflects your church’s success.
Evidence of salvation among members reflects your church’s success.
Growth in the faith of members reflects your church’s success.
A church that produces reliable disciples is finding significant success.
A church that fosters families of faith finds significant success.
A church that brings comfort to the hurting finds significant success.
A church that fosters healing of the hurting finds significant success.
Miracles of healing, provision, faith, and appearances reveal success.
A church succeeds when members experience God’s presence.
Rich fellowship in the body is another reliable indicator of success.