Are We Measuring Discipleship All Wrong? A Fresh Framework for Your Church
My version 1.0 approach to measuring whole-church discipleship.
As a “Discipleship Pastor” one of the things I’m supposed to do is help my church improve at making disciples. I think the best way to make disciples is to build disciple-makers who will then participate in the mission of making disciples. I’ve written before about measuring individual growth as a disciple. Today I want to write about my early-stage plan of measuring growth of a church’s disciples.
Difficulties/Limitations
I think that measuring whole church discipleship becomes more difficult in larger churches. I think it would be proportionally more difficult to measure in larger churches, perhaps even exponentially more difficult. I’ve worked in small churches of 30-50 on a Sunday. I knew everyone. I could tell you everyone’s story. It’s pretty hard to hide things in a group of people this small. It was easy to know which disciple-making stage each person was in. We had a few disciple-makers. Primarily the pastor (not me) was the disciple-maker, with help from a couple of others (including me).
Then, I worked in an “average size” American church of 150ish on Sundays that grew to around 300. Again, I knew most people personally and therefore knew their stories. The ones who had been in church more than a year or so were easy for me to analyze. Though even at this size, it is possible to hide things and it certainly happened. We had a dozen or so disciple-makers, but the staff was still primarily the lead disciple-makers at the church.
The church were I work now averages nearly 1500 people in person on Sunday with hundreds more online. I do not know everyone personally. I oversee about 100 leaders. I may not know everyone personally, but my hope is that their group Bible study leaders do. My hope is that church leaders are guiding people along the discipleship pathway. In a church of this size, I have to disciple disciple-makers. There is no way (that I’ve seen) for the staff to disciple everyone in a church of this size.
So how and what do we measure?
I mentioned before this is a version 1.0 post. I will likely revise the method in the future. Right now here are the things I’m measuring:
Steps taken in the discipleship process. We already measure Baptisms and Church Memberships. Now we will measure how many people first attended a class, a men’s or women’s ministry event, or a group (Bible study or Recovery). Yes this will produce a number larger than the total attender number. It is a “steps taken” not attendance number. Do you have a better idea, let me know in the comments!
New Leaders. How many new leaders did we produce? Yes, I would count someone moving from one leadership position into another because that opens up a slot for another leader. Do you think this should be restricted to certain types of leaders, or all leaders in general?
Potential Leaders. I’m working on a formula to identify these (it won’t be perfect). It might be something like: People who have attended a group regularly and a ministry event 2x’s. These would be people that I need to to be sure I get to know more deeply so that we know if they are ready to move from a disciple to a disciple-maker. In fact, they may already be a disciple-maker outside of “official church roles” and I just didn’t know it. Do you think I should also measure the conversations I have with these people?
Total people who took any step. I have a feeling this number will be larger than the weekly worship attendance number too. At least it should be with the way that only about half of those who attend once a month attend weekly. My gut says it should be 3x - but we will see what the data says later.
Conclusion
I don’t think this attempt to use metrics will give me certainty about who is and isn’t a disciple-maker, but it will give me a better understanding than me guessing. Using a methodology like this allows leaders (me) to aim at something and try to improve at what I’m doing. I’m of the opinion that it is really easy to say that I feel like we’re doing a good job at “x”. It’s harder to say that if the data is moving the other direction. In fact my purpose in measuring these things isn’t to say that my church is better than yours or anything like that. My purpose is to see if I’m doing the very best to honor God in my context, making more disciples year over year if possible.
I would recommend that you check out some other writers here on Substack. Some people I think create really helpful writing are:
I once heard someone saying “the second most dangerous thing you can do is try to measure spiritual growth. the most dangerous is to not measure spiritual growth”
I think the method you outlined is super helpful and seems to be based around relationships which is a big plus. Measuring discipleship is complex and sticky, but it’s also necessary, so props to you for working towards that.
I really appreciate your attempt here to outline something practical. One of the issues I find in trying to measure spiritual growth among people is that it’s not linear. Growth almost has an inversion point where it looks like de growth when there’s actually a cooling of things that are unhealthy or unhelpful for the spiritual journey. I wonder how you would quantify things like the midlife passage/the dark night of the soul/the wall/seasons of disorientation in terms of maturity?
I can imagine what is challenging about these experiences is that they are almost impossible to pinpoint outside of relational intimacy. And that may be part of the problem: community is very hard to scale organizationally, and community is also the context of formation.