Metrics: Beyond the Numbers

Yogi Berra was a well-known baseball player in the 20th century. Aside from being an All-Star player, he was also known for his pithy remarks. As a kid, I remember my dad quoting Yogi’s humorous one-liners which always made me laugh. Among my favorite “Yogi-ism” was the story of when Yogi was driving with some other baseball players. After passing the same landmark three times, one of his fellow players said, “Yogi, you’re lost,” and he replied, “​​Yeah, I know it. But we’re making good time, ain’t we?”

There are times when this is what ministry feels like. We’re not 100% sure where we’re going, or even if we’re headed in the right direction, but we’re certainly keeping ourselves busy on the journey. “Success” in the church isn’t always measurable like it is in the business world. How do you measure someone’s spiritual growth? Can you assign a score to a person’s discipleship journey? Can you create a pie-chart to show how your congregation is doing in sharing their faith? Or forgiving one another?

Measuring the Immeasurable

Not every aspect of growth can be measured, but pastors often measure their success (and the success of others) on raw data. In this world of modern technology, it’s easy to slip into a simple “church as business” model of ministry. Social media makes it hard to miss what other churches and pastors are doing, and TikTok is full of influencers offering their “Five helpful tips” guaranteed to grow your church.

Don’t get me wrong - I love helping churches plan and implement new strategies to help their ministries adapt and grow, but metrics and dashboards don’t always give the full picture of what is happening in our churches. So, before we add data to dashboards, we should remember first and foremost that making disciples is not a 12-step program that can be easily charted and graphed.

Maybe your Sunday morning numbers haven’t changed, but your people are receiving a greater depth of teaching from the pulpit. Maybe you haven’t recruited any new small group leaders for the fall, but more prayer is happening in the groups currently meeting. Maybe you haven’t baptized more people this year, but the congregation is more engaged in worship and hungry for the presence of God.

These are all areas of growth and discipleship, but it’s nearly impossible to distill these experiences into raw data.

Measuring the Measurable

So, if true spiritual growth is so hard to quantify, why bother focusing on numbers and metrics at all? Because data is a useful indicator letting you know if you’re close to being “on target.” Good data allows you to establish baselines and goals to keep moving forward in the direction you feel God is calling you. Tracking this information can help you respond well to the needs of your congregation and community and steward the resources (financial and personnel) that you have been entrusted to steward. What you choose to measure should align with your church’s priorities and Planning Center has some incredible features to help you track and view this data in a clear, easy-to-understand way.

What’s Important to You

Start by making a list of things that are significant to your church. Most churches already have processes in place to track weekend attendance and giving, but what other things are vital to the life of your church? Maybe it’s prayer ministry, or baptism, or evangelism. Maybe you put an emphasis on building community through small groups or serving. Clarify what things make your local church unique and decide how you’d like to measure involvement in those areas. Using Planning Center, you can then track participation and detect trends.

By setting up your Metrics dashboard (found in Planning Center People), you can easily track attendance, group engagement, baptisms, new visitors, etc. By adding widgets, you can customize your dashboard – each widget represents a piece of data that you want to track. Widgets can be configured to show you the timeframe you are interested in seeing (30 days, 13 weeks, or 12 months), and you can also view year-over-year results. Widgets can be renamed, duplicated, and edited as needed. Once your dashboard is built you can share it with other Planning Center People users, so you all have the information at your fingertips.

These dashboard metrics are a helpful tool to help leaders measure what can be measured in our churches, empowering teams to make strategic decisions, identify trends, and encourage teams. If you want to learn more about setting up your dashboard, check out this Planning Center article about custom dashboards or contact us at info@threefold.solutions to see how we can help your team maximize your Planning Center tools.

Alicia Osgood

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