When I first started blogging for this column, my brief was to stimulate discussion about strategic thinking for churches. Then I became distracted with other good things – Synod, the first ever kcc NextGen in Uganda, and then NextGen here.

Now, I will return to my original brief and particularly the topic of measuring ministry success.

We are terrible at it.

Some hide behind theological arguments. I am all for faithfulness being the most important priority, but it is still true that when people did not listen to 72 evangelists, they were told to move on (cf Luke 10). Proverbs tells us to use the wisdom that is embedded in the world (learn from the ants, of all things – Proverbs 30:25), and in fact that wisdom was one of the first of God’s creations (cf Proverbs 8).

I’ll save a more detailed theology of both the legitimacy and imperative of using strategic thinking as a topic for a future blog.

The secret: inputs and outputs

In this column I want to reflect on what was a revolutionary shift for me, and that is the realisation that ‘outputs’ are different to ‘inputs’. More to the point, churches are notorious for confusing the two.

Part of the difficulty is the very nature of ministry.

A business can use financial measures such as profit to evaluate its success, but our results cannot be measured in monetary terms. The ends to which we are working are multi-faceted. Ultimately, God has left us in the world to see people saved. Whilst some are clear when they cross the line, for many it is a more gradual process.

Even then it is not quite that simple. The godliness of Christians is another ‘output’. Faithfulness is another.

But my fear is that we limit our measures to those that are easiest to measure, and they generally revolve around inputs. One example: we now have a childrens’ minister (or any other new staff appointment). That is a wonderful thing to do, but it is an input to achieve an end. It is not an output in itself.

I am struck, as another example, that our measure of the effectiveness of various ethnic ministries tends to revolve around the number of ethnic ministers. Yes, this is relatively easy to measure. But it is an input measure, not an effectiveness (or output) measure.

An unintended consequence of those missionary global maps is to reinforce this kind of thinking – because there is a pin in one country, the slippery slope is to assume that the country is ‘covered’. But is it really the case that just one couple in a country of millions of people means that the country is reached with the news of Jesus?

The take home message …. don’t confuse inputs and outputs, even though the latter may be hard to measure.

Perhaps we can can discuss ways in which we can use the concept of ‘outputs’ better. Are there other legitimate outputs for churches that I haven’t mentioned?