Last week I introduced three key steps to help ministries maintain momentum and effectiveness over the long haul – evaluation, adaptation, and excellence. This week, we take a focused look at how to execute ministry evaluation that has meaning. The average leader has little time to wade through mountains of data (if we even have mechanisms in place to collect said data). We also have the task of actually leading the ministries! Our goal in evaluating has less to do with adding tasks and more to do with maximizing our time spent in ministry work. There are three simple steps we can take in our ministry leadership to ask questions as we go about our work that will sharpen our understanding of what our ministry really does, how people engage with our ministry, and what steps we can take that will preserve energy among volunteers while increasing the benefit to those we serve.
Qualitative over Quantitative
Great ministry evaluation keeps a qualitative focus. As a lover of charts, graphs, diagrams, and trends I’m among the first to point to the important place of quantitative data, However, that type of evaluation only has a very small place in effective ministry evaluation.
Qualitative ministry evaluation keeps a focus on the impact that our ways our ministry behaviors, habits, and attitudes impact those we serve. I’ll pick on my own ministry for an example. A key component of my official duties includes identifying guests, generating contact information, executing follow up, and engaging them in pathways that lead them from guest, to member, to family. Early in my work at Westover, I placed tremendous effort and energy into ensuring the first three steps of that work happened as quickly as possible. I had multiple volunteers working the lobby and worship center each week to identify as many guests as possible, drum up a phone number and email address from any willing to supply it, and make first contact to guests before 3:00 Sunday afternoon.
When I evaluated my work from a quantitative perspective, I found serious satisfaction in counting the number of people identified and contacted in a highly efficient manner. However, when I began to step back to review the entire process, I began asking more qualitative question. Things like, “Does early contact communicate a sense of welcome that motivates engagement?” I learned that what I did worked really well for people who were self-starters. However, not all people fit that category.
The average guest showing up at church today comes with the desire to remain unnoticed until they’ve decided if they can trust or enjoy this new church enough to make themselves known. My pursuit of a ministry model that focused on quantitatively outcomes led to ministry behaviors that came across to no small number of guests as pushy and self-serving.
Qualitative evaluation questions helped me to see that I over-emphasized efficiency to the detriment of people who were not ready to jump in with both feet feeling truly welcomed. That was a hard lesson because I loved the narrative of someone showing up on Sunday, being in Discover Westover the following week, and placing membership within four weeks of their first visit. If I had only focused on quantity of people getting in the system and becoming members, I never would have noticed the important swath of people I was leaving out.
Collaborative
The true goal of evaluation is to see through the assumptions we all have about our ministry. You can find all sorts of tools for this when reviewing evaluation practices across different industries, but I find a uniquely Christian (and super simple) method for getting past our own blinders is the simple act of collaboration.
A couple questions leaders need to ask themselves prior to collaborative evaluation include:
- Does your ministry activity allow margin for sustained collaborative effort?
- Do you have the ability to hear different perspectives from a posture of openness?
If you don’t have time for collaboration, the first step is to take a good look at how your spending your ministry time and find places you can free up space to allow you to ask questions of others. If you have a negative answer to the second question, the best thing you can do is to own where you are and reach out to a trusted co-leader, ministry staff, or elder. We’ve all felt the need to be protective of our ministry space, but this posture of defensiveness doesn’t allow us to receive the feedback and collaborative responses of others well.
On a practical note, here are a few questions that work well in collaborative evaluation:
- What’s the thing our ministry does best for the people we serve?
- If you could wave a wand and change one thing about our ministry, what would it be?
- Name something that our ministry is doing right that we should do more of?
- What’s something we’re not perfect at in our ministry? Can you think of a story that shows when we did that a better way?
- On a scale of 1 to 5, with 5 being the best, how well does our ministry accomplish the things that are most important?
These questions, and questions like them, are great to ask of both people serving in your ministry and those your ministry serves. By allowing others to speak into your ministry, you gain the chance to see things in a new light that can open up brand new doors of possibility for how your ministry can move forward over the long haul.
Value based
When it comes to evaluation, most of us have the default of looking for data points – how many people served, number of people engaged, dollars given, etc. These are not unworthy numbers, but they lack the weight necessary to support long-term engagement for ministry effort. When we want to identify evaluative information that will inspire long-term engagement, we need to shift our attention toward the ways our ministry lives out core values that inspire people.
Simon Sinek provides a great description of the different messages we can collect and focus on, which communicators refer to as “the Golden Circle of Communication.” Imagine a concentric circle, with the outer circle being the least inspiring and the inner circle being most inspiring. Questions and feedback around “how” many scratch our practical itch, but this carries little to no motivating power. The next level of information is about “what.” What are the grand things we hope to accomplish? What are the ways we make this world look a little more like the Kingdom? The final, and most motivating, layer of information we can grab hold of is “why.” Why does this ministry exist? Why do the needs we meet matter? Why does the church/world need this ministry to exist?
If we want to evaluate our ministry and gain information that carries formative and long-term significance, we need to be asking our people less about “how and more about “what” and “why.”
Something to Think About 