Nor Cal / Nev College Ministries

Problems Measuring Ministry Productivity

Last week I saw an award-winning author get interviewed. At one point the topic turned to productivity, and the author opined: “There are a lot of things I can do and justify in my mind as an author: research, brainstorming, or getting my workspace set up just right. But at the end of the day, I look at how many words I’ve put on paper. That tells me whether I’m being productive or I’m just making myself busy.”

I had two emotional responses: admiration and envy. I felt admiration because this was obviously a person of discipline and ambition. I felt envy because it must be nice to have such a simple metric to evaluate your day.

It’s a little more complex when you’re a minister.

There are things we can measure in ministry—the most obvious being “butts in seats” as some pastors indelicately put it. There are other things we also tend to measure, such as conversions, offerings, and baptisms. These measurements have their place, but there are two huge problems with using any of these as tools to evaluate our daily productivity.

First, these are weekly metrics that aren’t that useful for evaluating a daily schedule. “Martha, I’m so excited! I feel confident that we’ll have 1% more converts this week as a result of my discipleship meeting with Tim this morning.” Or “Frank—I feel sure that as a result of my extra fifteen minutes of prayer today attendance at our worship service will be up 2.3%!” It’s silly to assign value to these important daily activities using such statistics.

There’s an even better reason to be cautious with these measurements: there is a difference between a good decision and a good outcome. “The race is not to the swift or the battle to the strong, nor does food come to the wise or wealth to the brilliant or favor to the learned; but time and chance happen to them all” (Ecclesiastes 9:11, NIV).

Sometimes in ministry we have good results and sometimes we have bad results. Those are usually related to our personal effectiveness, but not always. If we adopt results as our only measuring stick, we guarantee that we will periodically pat ourselves on the back for doing shoddy work and kick ourselves all the way home after a season of solid labor.

Read the last two paragraphs again. They really matter.

For example, I know one pastor who pioneered a church that flopped, and then moved to take over a small church which exploded in growth (becoming the largest church in its region). An aspiring young minister asked him what he had done differently in this church than in the previous one, and the highly successful pastor replied humbly, “Not a thing. I pray the same, I lead the same, and I even preach some of the same messages.”

“Butts in seats” should never determine our self-worth. The big churches are not always to the best leaders, the big crowds are not always to the best preachers, and the converts are not always to the best evangelists.

Low attendance should always cause us to evaluate our ministry (and our leadership), but not even Jesus was successful everywhere he went. In Mark 6:1-5 we read about the time Jesus' ministry flopped. He did all the right things, and the results did not follow. The results did not follow because it was not all up to him—the people to whom he was ministering did not want to receive his ministry.

Let me be clear: I keep track of “butts in seats” and other useful measurements because I think they are important indicators of the health of my organization. I just do not find them useful in determining how effectively I am stewarding my time and energy. Sometimes attendance is down and it’s not my fault, sometimes attendance is up and it’s not because of anything I did.

A Possible Solution

What I’ve said doesn’t mean that we can’t measure something that will give us useful information about our productivity—it just means that we have to ensure that what we measure meets two criteria that “butts in seats” does not:

1. It must be a measurement of our daily activities instead of our weekly ones.
2. It must be a measurement of things that are within our control rather than things that we only influence.

Let us look to the Scriptures and see if there are any clues there:

• “We apostles should spend our time preaching and teaching the word of God, not administering a food program… we'll stick to our assigned tasks of prayer and speaking God's Word.” (Acts 6:2-4, NLT)
• “As for me, far be it from me that I should sin against the LORD by failing to pray for you. And I will teach you the way that is good and right.” (1st Samuel 12:23, NIV)
• {A minister’s} responsibility is to equip God's people to do His work and build up the church, the body of Christ… (Ephesians 4:12, CEV)
• Preach the word of God. Be persistent, whether the time is favorable or not. Patiently correct, rebuke, and encourage your people with good teaching… keep your head in all situations, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, discharge all the duties of your ministry. (2nd Timothy 4:2-5, NLT)
• Command and teach these things. Don’t let anyone look down on you because you are young, but set an example for the believers in speech, in life, in love, in faith and in purity. Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching (1st Timothy 4:11-13, NIV).
• Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, and sound speech that cannot be condemned… (Titus 2:7-8, ESV)
• So I ask you to follow my example and do as I do. That is the very reason I am sending Timothy—to help you do this. (1 Cor 4:16-17, NLT)

Three key responsibilities recur in these passages:

1. We are to pray for those we serve.
2. We are to model Christianity for those we serve.
3. We are to teach God’s Word to those we serve.

To be sure, we have many more responsibilities as ministers. We must visit the sick, lead meetings, keep track of the church finances, and a zillion other things. But these three areas seem to be where God expects to spend the bulk of our time.

Therefore, I’d like to propose three simple questions we can use to evaluate our day.

1. How much time did I spend in prayer today?
2. How many meaningful conversations did I have today?
3. How much time did I spend preparing for my teaching responsibilities today?

Time In Prayer

This is a dangerous one—assessing time in prayer too easily becomes a legalistic trap. Still, I think it’s safe to say that the number one peril in ministry is public faith and private atheism.

We really think we can do what we are called to do without God’s help or direction. At least, I sometimes do. If I’m regularly assessing my prayer life as one of my core work responsibilities I am less likely to let it slide.

The apostles passed up a task assignment to give time to prayer, so I shouldn’t feel guilty letting good work go undone because I’m praying. And if those to whom I minister give me flak about it, I’d rather be right with God than right with them.

Meaningful Conversations

This flows directly from the idea of modeling. People can’t emulate what they can’t see. The way we act in the pulpit isn’t much of an example to anyone. It’s the way we act in the supermarket that matters.

Conversations are a tangible measure of how much personal interaction we’ve had with others. They’re vital to both evangelism and discipleship. They are the essence of relationship. In short, they’re the very lifeline of ministry.

What constitutes a meaningful conversation? A meaningful conversation is one in which you reveal truth in a way that the other person can understand it. Sometimes the revelation is by modeling (“so that’s how I can react when someone makes me angry”), sometimes by explaining (“so that’s how I can take every thought captive”), or sometimes by accident (you drop an aside into the conversation and don’t realize how deep the arrow strikes).

I almost titled this section “meaningful encounters” to include things like smiling at the checkout clerk and generally being an uplifting presence, but there were three reasons I chose to measure conversations:

1. Encounters are fuzzy whereas conversations are tangible.
2. If I’m having conversations I can be sure I’m also having lesser encounters, but the reverse is not true. I can enter a smiling shell and not have a meaningful conversation for days on end.
3. Conversations are essential to our goals. We don’t simply want people to be happier for a short while because our peaceful aura entered their awareness—we want them to understand how they themselves can experience the peace that passes all understanding.

So pay attention to how many conversations you have with people outside your office. It will tell you a great deal about your priorities and your effectiveness.

Preparing For Teaching

Finally, I should devote some time every day to preparing for my teaching responsibilities. This includes leadership training times and other outlets in addition to the weekly preaching of the word.

We must not only prepare for our next responsibility, we must seek to hone our skills as a preacher. Contrary to popular belief, experience is not the best teacher. Reflected on experience is the best teacher.

We must regularly take time to analyze our preaching and our people’s response to it. This habit will reap rewards not just for next week’s message but also for the rest of our lives.

We should also be aggressive in blocking out preparation time. Again—good things must go undone so that we can prepare. We have to prepare in three ways:

1. Truly understanding the text. Too many preachers skip this step. They use a search engine to do a superficial topical study and then they substitute flamboyance and emotion for sound understanding. Our calling is not just to motivate people but to help them learn the truths of God’s Word. We can’t explain what we don’t know.
2. Applying the text to our lives. Again, many preachers skip this step. If we don’t live it either we don’t understand it or we don’t believe it. In either case, we have no place saying it. We are allowed to speak beyond our experience as long as we’re honest about it (“I really struggle with this, but I know my goal is to…”), but we’re not allowed to deceive others into believing something that we ourselves don’t believe.
3. Figuring out how to best explain the text. Most of my peers devote considerable time to this step. All I can say is, keep learning to do it better. Devote the rest of your life to the ongoing improvement of your ability to interest people with your words. I’ve heard that a wide-ranging body of evidence demonstrates that it takes about ten years of deliberate practice to develop truly impressive expertise at a complex task like mathematics or playing a musical instrument. My sense is that that’s probably about right for preaching. Not ten years of experience—ten years of deliberate practice. Most of us have a long, long way to go.

What if you’re not a preacher? Perhaps you’re the administrative pastor or a worship pastor. How does this apply to you? I have two competing answers inside me, and I haven’t decided which I think is better:

• On the one hand, I’d say substitute your core responsibility for ‘teaching time.’ As an administrative pastor, I’d ask myself how much time I spent organizing the church in a way that facilitates rather than hinders ministry. As a worship pastor, I’d ask myself how much time I spent preparing to lead worship this week.
• On the other hand, I’d say that your fundamental responsibility doesn’t change at all—just the means of expression. You’re still expected to teach people about God. As an administrative pastor, you do that by creating policies and procedures that reflect the character of God. Just as the Law teaches us about God’s nature, so should a church’s structure. As a worship pastor, you do that through the songs you select and the way you disciple the others on your worship team.

In Conclusion

So how can I know if I’m being a good steward of my time and energy? It’s sure not by looking at my weekly attendance figures—there’s not enough of a correlation between my day-to-day activities and what happens at the worship meeting. When it comes to the effectiveness of my own life I should look at the scriptural mandates for ministry: prayer, relationship, and teaching.