The Significant Seven: Metrics every church should be monitoring

A few years ago, I started using some “church management software” that I was, for several reasons, pretty excited about. First, it was web-based, so it was platform agnostic and allowed me to delegate tasks. Second, it was flexible, meaning that it was designed to allow me to track the data I wanted, the way I wanted. Third, it was affordable. In fact, it was open source, meaning that I could download the code and deploy it on my own server for free. This was a compelling thing considering that many church management solutions are anything but free. In fact, many are prohibitively expensive for a small church like ours!

Sadly, though, all good things come to an end, right? And this past fall, I was saddened to find that my open source church management solution would no longer run on the latest version of PHP, and it was no longer being maintained. So much for that option.

So I went back to searching for a church management solution that would meet my requirements of web-based, flexible, and affordable. And I found… nothing. At least, nothing that I felt adequately met all three of these requirements.

Further, having just finished a master’s degree with a specialization in church revitalization, I was disheartened to find that none of the options I found made it easy to track what I will call the Significant Seven metrics of a church and discern patterns and trends from the same.

What are the Significant Seven metrics of a church, you ask? I will tell you!

Worship Attendance

I have an uneasy relationship with tracking worship attendance. I am not convinced it is the only or best measure of church health, and yet, there are countless pastors and others who hold it up as the singular metric. However, I cannot argue with the fact that, if attendance is perennially sliding, there is some problem that must be addressed. That much seems obvious, but when I say that I want to track worship attendance, I mean to track more than a simple tally of how many people were in worship.

In fact, when I say that I want to track worship attendance, I am talking about both the simple statistic, which can serve as something of a dashboard warning light, and also individuals’ attendance as well.

Being able to track individuals’ attendance is essential to identify patterns. For instance, Sally used to attend church on a monthly basis. At Christmas last year, though, the pastor’s message cut her to the heart, and she has really been growing in her faith ever since. Thus, she is now attending worship every week. Good news! Conversely, Ted used to attend every week, but his health has been failing in recent months. He has not wanted to bother the pastor, but he has been unable to get out of bed four Sundays in the last two months. Bad news! Even worse, though, is Carl, who has recently begun to question his faith. He used to attend church every week, but now he is only there every other week.

Now, in our small church, I will probably notice such things over the course of a few months. Maybe. But in larger churches, we can easily lose sight of the trees for the forest. In fact, studies have shown that many churches can decline in attendance over several consecutive years without anyone noticing because people do not disappear altogether, all at once. In other words, while each of the above situations warrants pastoral attention, these parishioners may not receive any attention for several months. If at all. And by the time they do, it may already be too late.

Also, studies suggest that a healthy church will lose 5-8% of its parishioners annually through death, transfer, reversion, etc. This natural attrition has been described as the church’s “back door,” and keeping track of who is coming and going can help identify a back door that is swinging wide open!

Conversions

Every month, I receive a report which includes statistical data from all of the churches in our judicatory. One of my pet peeves is churches that report multitudes of salvations but never any growth in attendance. It seems to me that this could indicate several things. First, it could point to a serious problem with the guest follow-up and retention systems that the church has in place. Second, it could indicate that the church is losing as many people as it is gaining. Third, it could hint at a faulty understanding of discipleship.

Indeed, I cannot tell you how many people have bowed at the altar of our church and then walked out the front door, never to be seen or heard from again. They believe that, simply by saying the sinner’s prayer, they have spiritually arrived, and there is nothing left for them to do.

When I say that we need to track conversions, then, I am saying that we need to track the lives that are being changed by the power of God through the ministries of our churches.

For this reason, I hesitate to count people as converted simply because they came to the altar. Rather, I count them as converted when I can reasonably conclude that they have repented and begun to lead a new life in Christ. After all, if we are not seeing lives changed, what is the point?

Offerings

Technically, every church in America is required to track offerings. We have to provide parishioners with tax receipts at the end of the year. But what if there was more to the offerings than whether or not we hit our budget?

Studies have shown that giving to churches is an early indicator of someone’s departure. That is, before a person leave the church, he or she will often stop giving. Further, I would submit that per capita giving is a valuable bit of information that a pastor should have in his or her kit because it is an important indicator of spiritual growth amongst the entire congregation. It may also provide hints into the needs of a congregation and/or community.

For instance, if attendance remains the same, but overall giving goes up, what does that say about the spiritual vitality of the congregation? Conversely, if attendance remains the same, but overall giving falls, what does that indicate? Perhaps the factory just closed, and people are having a tough time making ends meet. Or perhaps they need to be taught about biblical stewardship and generosity.

Please note the implication of this: the raw statistics are never the whole story. Thus, they must never be seen as an end in and of themselves. However, they can provide hints as to which questions should be asked.

First-Time Guests

No matter how you slice it, the church’s Great Commission is to go and make disciples. This mandate includes baptizing new believers and teaching existing believers to obey all that Christ commanded. The number of first-time guests through our doors is a crucial gauge of how well we are doing at this mission because real disciples of Jesus will make new disciples of Jesus.

The logic behind this is obvious: churches cannot grow if people do not attend for the first time. More specifically, studies have shown that a healthy church experiencing moderate growth will during the course of a year welcome as many first-time guests as it averages in worship attendances. This “front door” of the church is an important indicator of how we are doing as witnesses (Acts 1:8) because, while there will probably always be a handful of people who visit a church off the street, the chances are slim that a church will reach this benchmark without parishioners actively seeking and inviting their friends, families, and others. If that is not happening, then this front door will be constrained, perhaps even closed, and there will be virtually no chance for the church to accomplish its mission to make more disciples.

Third-Time Guests

This is where life gets interesting. And mathematically challenging.

The chart below shows the percentage of guests who were active members at the end of one year in non-growing churches compared to growing churches.

Times VisitingNon-Growing ChurchGrowing Church
19%21%
217%38%
336%57%

Put another way, after one year, non-growing churches retain less than half as many guests as growing churches. This difference can be attributed largely to whether or not the congregation has an effective guest follow-up system in place. But do we have to wait a whole year to see if our guest follow-up system is working? Fortunately, if we track the number of guests who return for a second and third time, the answer is no.

Using these tables, we can predict how many guests should be returning. If our guest follow-up system is effective and our church is growing, then the ratio of first-time guests to second-time guests in a growing church is approximately 55.26% (i.e., .21 / .38). By comparison, the same ratio in a non-growing church is approximately 52.9% (i.e., .09 / .17). Now, it does not take a rocket scientist to discern that these numbers are not identical, but since we rarely see fractions of a guest in churches, especially in smaller congregations like mine, it becomes difficult to see the difference.

Look, however, at what happens at the third visit. The percentage of second-time guests who return for a third visit in a healthy church is approximately 66.7% (i.e., .38 / .57). In comparison, a non-growing church will see only 47.1% of its second-time guests return for that third visit. Put another way, if two churches each have ten first-time guests this Sunday, the growing congregation will see 6 of those guests next Sunday, and 4 of them the Sunday after that. In comparison, the non-growing church will see 5 of those guests next Sunday, and 2 the week after that.

In the typical growing church, 36.8% of first-time guests arrive for their third visit, while only 24.9% do so in the typical non-growing church. We monitor our third-time guests, then, to gauge whether our guest follow-up and integration systems are effective.

Small Groups Involvement

At our church, we call them Discover Groups. Other congregations call them Life Groups or Sunday School. Whatever your church calls them, they are simply smaller groups of Christians connected by some common bond. These groups are crucial to discipleship. Simply put, it is difficult to effectively disciple Christians in a large group. Thus, the number of people involved in these small groups is an important indicator of the church’s effectiveness in discipleship.

One of the things that many do not realize, though, is that small groups involvement is also an important predictor of who will be sticking with the church, and who will be dropping out. Indeed, studies have shown that, while dropout rates of new parishioners falls off dramatically after their third visit, there is a spike in dropouts around six months later. The reason people leave the church after six months? Studies show that those who drop out will have fewer than 7 new relationships within the church. If they have fewer than 3 new relationships, the dropout rate is virtually 100%.

What is a more natural catalyst for forging relationships than a small group setting?

Thus, we must measure small group participation to measure both our effectiveness in discipleship and as an indicator of the opportunities for newcomers to forge new relationships.

Volunteers

Lastly, one of my goals for this year is to track the unique volunteers who make ministry happen at our church. Ephesians 2:10 says that we are “created in Christ Jesus for good works.” Thus, service is a key indicator of authentic faith, and as the number of volunteers increases or decreases, so also the overall spiritual health of our parishioners.

More practically, though, there are people in our churches who sit in our pews and consume. There are people who believe enough in our mission and vision to throw a few bucks at it. And then there are those who are willing to commit their time and energies to seeing that mission and vision realized. The portion of the congregation which is actively serving in various ministries, then, is a crucial indicator of not just spiritual vitality, but also organizational vitality. How clear and compelling is our mission and vision? How well are we doing equipping and commissioning believers to accomplish it? The number of unique people who are serving in our various ministries from week to week is an important indicator of these things.

Moreover, who is volunteering is an essential metric of how well the church is integrating newcomers. In addition to the six-month offramp mentioned above, studies have shown that, at about twelve months, people will exit the church if they do not feel that they are contributing in some meaningful way. For a few, this will be financial, but for most, volunteering is the substantive contribution that they are really hoping to make. The fact is, people want to feel that their lives are making a difference. And if they do not feel that they are doing that in your church, then they will move on to somewhere that they can.

Bonus: Invitations

But wait! There is more! One other metric may be important if you can find a way to effectively gauge it: personal invitations. Why is this important? Because a personal invitation is twelve to fifteen times more effective in increasing visitor volume to a church than a simple public announcement (e.g., radio, TV, direct mailing, door knocking). Also, nothing says, “I’m in,” as clearly as someone telling their friends, “Hey, you gotta check this out!”

So there you have it, the Significant Seven metrics that research suggests every church should be monitoring. And as I build my church management system, I will be endeavoring to make it easy to not only input this information, but also to discern patterns and trends from it.