One Sunday evening, Jim Edwards, our former minister to young adults, illustrated a sermon point with a story about a hitchhiker. Jim said that when he was a college student making a long drive back to school in the Northwest, he picked up a hobo. As they zoomed along the interstate, the hobo kept seeing things along the shoulder.
“Look!” he’d shout. “There’s an old coat. Stop so I can pick it up.” Next he saw a tire iron, a shoe, and a screwdriver. He had an eagle eye for junk.
Jim, however, didn’t stop. When the hobo finally got out of the car, he said, “You’re sure missing a lot of good stuff along the road.”
During the rest of his drive, Jim wondered how the man could have seen all those things at freeway speed. He finally concluded that in life you see what you’re looking for.
I’ve found his conclusion valid, especially in measuring the results of a ministry or activity at church.
If you’re like me, you want to see your involvement make a difference. You want to see the ministry become more effective. You want results. But how do you measure results in a largely spiritual enterprise? How do you gauge the effectiveness of, say, a choir or Sunday school class or missions conference?
It helps, I’ve learned, to keep asking, “What are we looking for?”
Before we can evaluate
As a member of a committee or a congregation, I cannot evaluate results unless I, along with others, know our intention or goal. In ministry activities, especially, that’s sometimes hard to pin down. But until we know what we want to do (what we’re looking for), we’ll never know how well we’ve done.
In Peter Drucker’s classic book The Effective Executive, he tells the story of Theodore Vail, a man whom he calls “the least known of the great American business builders.” Vail was president of the Bell Telephone system from just before 1910 until the mid-twenties. Under his leadership, Bell’s motto became “Service is our business.” This was not a popular approach at the time, when the emphasis was profitability. But Vail was so committed to his approach that, Drucker says, he “saw to it that the yardsticks throughout the system by which managers and their operations were judged measured service fulfillment rather than profit performance.” Vail was looking for improved service, so he developed a way to measure service.
He knew what he was looking for, and thus, he was able to tell when he had reached it.
The bottom line of ministry
How does that translate to the church? What should we look for in our work there?
The bottom line of ministry, of course, is people being drawn to Christ and helped to grow in their faith. If we can’t see clear evidence of that, other indicators of success are of little value.
Not long ago, a man told me the story of his twenty-year walk away from God and his recent turnaround. While he was moving away from God, this man pastored a church for seven years. Under his leadership, the church doubled its membership, tripled its budget, and built a 100,000-square-foot addition. People constantly told him how much they enjoyed his sermons and how well he preached.
Yet he wept as he told me that looking back on his pastorate, he couldn’t think of one person who came to faith in Jesus Christ because of his ministry. Why? “It was not my intention,” he said, “for people to accept Christ or follow him as a result of my preaching and pastoral ministry.”
At the time, he was purposely distancing himself from his devout background. He was not looking for commitment from people. He was successful in what he set out to do, but he looks back now with remorse that he didn’t set out to do the right thing.
Ultimately, any vital church ministry looks for increased commitment to Christ and growth in him.
Reaching the single-minded
But at that point the similarity in church ministries may end. The effectiveness of the finance committee and the choir are measured by two vastly different criteria. And the nursery and senior high group have their own unique gauges for success.
So it’s critical that the people in each ministry determine what they’re looking for. Then they know when they’ve reached it.
Several years ago our church began a Sunday school class for singles, and I was asked to be the teacher. The singles had several goals: to be distinctly Christian, not another “meet market” as many secular groups were; to offer solid teaching from the Bible; to reach new people; and to meet the social and practical needs of singles.
I agreed with their goals, and I felt that for them to become reality, we had to do two things: pray for the class and develop spiritual leaders among the men. I’d read that in most singles groups there were nine women for every man. Single women usually would come to a church group without much coaxing. Single men you had to work on. So I determined to look for these two things: prayer and men growing as leaders.
Before the first class meeting, I asked half a dozen men if they would meet me one morning a week to pray for the class. We met at 6 A.m. at a local restaurant, had breakfast together, and then sat in a car in the parking lot to pray. We prayed for many things, but especially for God’s drawing men into this group.
I also began for men an evening Bible study in our home, and eventually the weekly breakfast-and prayer meeting also became a fixture at our house. My wife’s home-cooked breakfasts were undoubtedly a bigger draw than the prayer time.
As a result of this and other factors, attendance began to grow, eventually tripling our beginning number. The group’s missions budget enlarged, and the social activities flourished. Were we a success?
That would be measured by two things. First, our success would be measured by the bottom line of any ministry – how well we brought people to Christ and helped them grow in him. We’re grateful to God that we’ve seen several men and women begin to walk with Christ.
Second, our success would be measured by the specific goals we had set. Were people praying more for the class and ministry than ever before? As best we could tell, they were, and there were formal opportunities for that. Were more men developing and using leadership skills than ever before? Today, in our group of single adults, the ratio of women to men is down to about 3:1. I still teach the singles’ class occasionally and marvel at the continuing development of male leadership within the group.
How are we doing?
When I try to evaluate my ministry activities these days, my mind is drawn back to a hitchhiking hobo, a daring business executive, and a handful of men in a pancake-house parking lot, fogging the windows of the car with their prayers. They taught me that the number of people present and the amount of money given are not enough to evaluate the effectiveness of a ministry.
To really answer “What’s happening in ministry?” I first need to ask, “What am I looking for?”
David McCasland is a freelance writer living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, where he attends First Presbyterian Church.
