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Question of the Day

What makes a church congregation "healthy"?  How do you measure or quantify that?

Yeah,

Submitted by reverend mommy on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 1:04pm.
I agree about the problem with "growth" = "health" -- but I definitely fall into that mindset so easily.

And I agree sometimes that a decrease in membership/attendance can increase health.  And I believe that a good statistician could help you adjust your numbers -- a church that is growing/declining at the same identical rate at the surrounding community is actually at "steady state."

Numbers, though, are what we have easily at hand.  How do we get the numbers to support hypotheses of health/disease?  How we we "measure" spiritual growth?

Deeper instruments like Natural Church Development might help -- what else?

That is a great question,

Submitted by guest on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 9:34am.
That is a great question, and one I have often thought of. I have wished that DS's would provide congregations with a metric tool to really evaluate congregational health, and I've wondered what would go into such a tool.divdivMy thoughts are that there are five basic things to consider (with some variation depending on context):div1. Is attendance moving up? (Most critical, I think)div2. Is membership moving up?div3. Is the budget balanced (or is the deficit reasonable) and growing?div4. Is the number of pledging units up?div5. If the congregation is endowed, is the percentage of income from the endowment declining?divdivThose are five areas that I think are critical to health. There are certainly others, but those five tend to be the most relevant and easily measured. There is nothing there about the quality of the congregation - which I think is also important, but harder to get at. Nor is there anything there about the faithfulness of the congregation - perhaps the most important thing, but impossible to measure, I suspect.

do numbers equal health?

Submitted by guest on Fri, 05/09/2008 - 11:48am.
I'm not sure I can agree with that statement--that if attendance/membership/giving units are all moving up, then that makes for a healthy congregation.  What if that congregation is in a dying town?  If the town (usually a small, rural one) loses 10% of it's population each year, how could we expect the congregation within that town to grow?  As a pastor of a fairly small church (average attendance approx 60), I had two disruptive families leave shortly after I arrived.  I am convinced that the congregation is healthier without them there.  I lost at least 6 members, two of the biggest givers in the congregation, and yet more has happened within the life of the congregation after they left than before. 

The problem with using numerical and objective indicators of health, is that they fail to take into account mitigating circumstances. 

Surely, part of congregational health assessments would ask, How do members of the congregation work through conflict?  or How often does the congregation engage in mission and service outside of the members of their own congregation?  how well do the church members look after one another?  Sure, if the answers to these questions are positive, then that may lead to an increase in attendance/membership/giving, but not necessarily. 

The next question that arises for me is, do we even need to 'measure' health?  Surely, a pastor can look at his or her congregation and know whether or not it's healthy. 
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