Measuring Success
by Loren Seibold, Best Practices editor
A conference leader said this to me: "We spend millions on evangelism in the NAD; we generate thousands of local meetings and a few big downlinks; and we report baptisms. But I keep looking for the non-immigrant church that in recent years has grown substantially and been transformed by evangelistic converts."
   
There are a few. (Bill McClendon's Tulsa, OK, church comes to mind). Immigrant churches, mostly Hispanic, have grown. But in American middle-class churches, durable evangelistic growth is the exception.

The visiting evangelist I had in my church years ago blamed me. "I baptized them. You failed to keep them," he said. We talk about this as the "back door" problem. But there's more to it than that.

I believe it has to do with how success is defined. What we hear about most is how many efforts are held. How big the evangelism offering at camp meeting. How many baptisms in a particular city. Only rarely do we measure the total impact on congregations. We take credit for starting a process, not for finishing it.

I wonder if all of this might be clarified by finding a new way of measuring success? Being a farmer, I know that you don't measure a harvest by how much seed you planted, nor even by how much you harvest from the field; you measure success after the grain is successfully stored away, sold and reinvested into the business.

It's easy to measure how much work we've done at the front end. How many meetings held, how many flyers distributed. The 30 baptized in the latest crusade makes a great picture in the union paper (even if half of them are gone by the time the picture comes out.) By those measures, we succeed. But thoughtful pastors have always been aware of the impact on our congregations. The cycle of baptizing and losing takes a toll.

How we define success tells us how we should go about our work. Perhaps holding everyone--pastors, evangelists, church-growth coordinators, even conference and union administrators--to the standard of how healthy our churches become through our outreach efforts would stimulate a new era of creativity in soul-winning. We would surely continue to use some of the same methods we use now, but they'd have to be part of a holistic, coordinated approach, in which opening church social boundaries and creating a positive community impact through service and involvement would be as important as delivering the doctrinal message.

Thoughts on a evangelism and healthy church growth? Write BestPractices@ameritech.net.