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On this episode of The Lead On Podcast, Jeff Iorg, president of the SBC Executive Committee, discusses measuring church health beyond simple stats like attendance and giving. He explains how leaders should analyze data in context while blending it with observations on prayer, missions, and life transformation.
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Welcome to the Lead On Podcast. This is Jeff Iorg, the president of the executive committee of the Southern Baptist Convention and your host for this podcast that likes to talk about practical issues related to ministry leadership. We are here today to talk about measuring church health. How do you know how healthy your church is? How can you measure its strength, how can you measure its progress, and how also can you determine maybe areas of weakness or concern.
Jeff Iorg:Measuring church health. Now, some people would reduce this conversation to some kind of a pass fail grading scale based on statistical variables that are going to lead to a definitive conclusion, healthy or unhealthy? Well, it's just not that simple. It is important to measure,
Jeff Iorg:data as it relates to your church and various aspects of it, but a church is more than an organization. It's also an organism, which means it's far more complex. A church is like a person
Jeff Iorg:who goes to the doctor to be diagnosed. Yes. The doctor will consider multiple variables, like test results, empirical evidence that comes from blood analysis, urinalysis, other kinds of ways of measuring health. But a good physician also knows how to ask probing questions and gain insight into a patient's lifestyle and mental state and other aspects of being that influence health.
Jeff Iorg:So if you're a church leader, it's important for you to look at the data and to use data to determine if your church is healthy or not. It's also important to go beyond the data,
Jeff Iorg:to know how to measure relative health, to know how to measure what some people might consider soft issues, and to actually find ways to determine if there's actual progress being made in areas like prayer,
Jeff Iorg:like life transformation, like relational health. These are
Jeff Iorg:some things that we have to analyze, think through, and consider in measuring overall church
Jeff Iorg:health. So today, I want to see if I can give
Jeff Iorg:you some tools to do both, to measure both the empirical or the data driven aspects of church health, and then also talk about, some of the other ways of looking at and determining the health of a church.
Jeff Iorg:Now, you might be asking, isn't one of these better than the other? Isn't data better than observation? Isn't information better than a hunch?
Jeff Iorg:Well, not really. Both approaches have merit. Both contribute to the holistic understanding of a church's condition. Both can also be abused or misused or ignored by leaders, and setting them at odds with each other isn't necessary because both have value. And when used in combination, both data and intuition, both information and observation, then it can contribute to a more thorough analysis.
Jeff Iorg:And part of your responsibility as a leader is to find a way to use all the available information to essentially and accurately measure your church's health. Now, the sad reality is some leaders reject both options. They resist thinking critically about their ministry setting and their results that they are experiencing because they frankly confuse thinking critically with being a critic. Now, those words sound similar, but their meanings are distinctly different. To think critically means to evaluate, to evaluate carefully and objectively.
Jeff Iorg:To critique something means to consider it in detail and to make careful analysis. That's different than being a critic. A critic assumes negativity. Now, critically, considering the condition of your church, doesn't assume a negative evaluation. We need
Jeff Iorg:to be honest about this, because demonstrating integrity and making fair, evaluation is a good leadership practice, but doing so only to reinforce negativity is counterproductive. When you are looking at a church and determining its health, you're when you're looking at a church to determine its health, you're you're not trying to do an autopsy. You're trying to provide an analysis so that you can treat conditions and hopefully bring about better health. Pastoral leaders like us, we we practice the cure of souls, not forensic medicine. We wanna take care of people and help them live.
Jeff Iorg:We wanna find signs of life and facilitate that life. That's what we're all about. So when I talk about analyzing church health, I'm not talking about being overly critical. I'm talking
Jeff Iorg:about doing this in a way that produces a critique but without a criticism. Now, I'm so sensitive about this because a few years ago this happened to me. I was pastoring in a church and
Jeff Iorg:I hit a rough rough patch, if you will. I didn't think the church was going all that well, and frankly, I didn't think I was, being, respected and responded to as a leader like I should have been. Frustration was brewing inside of me, but what I didn't realize was it was seeping out of me. In fact, it was actually gushing out of me. And after a particular Sunday, a trusted, lay leader in the church
Jeff Iorg:took me aside and said, pastor, is something bothering you? No, I replied, Testily, why why would you ask that? He said, well,
Jeff Iorg:because for the past several weeks, every sermon has felt like an attack, Like you're mad at us for some reason.
Jeff Iorg:Man. That hurt. It was painful to hear it, and it's painful to tell that story today, but my friend was right. I was angry.
Jeff Iorg:I was angry at my church for their supposedly poor performance on recent projects, and I was frustrated that they weren't responding more aggressively and more completely to my leadership, and those negative feelings were seeping through and poisoning my ministry, including my preaching. Now my friend was a wise and trusted leader. He gave me some good advice that day. He said, take a couple of days off and see if you can't rest and reflect and pray and regain your perspective. It was good counsel, and I have to tell you that everyone was happier the following Sunday.
Jeff Iorg:I was much happier in the way I preached the message, and the congregation was much happier in how it responded. In fact, what was interesting to me is that while I didn't share that conversation with anyone at the time, the following Sunday, after pulling away for a couple of days and recalibrating and coming back and preaching with a very different attitude, I actually had several people after the service comment to me on how different the service was that day, and for different reasons they said, but I kind of knew what the thread was that bound it all together. It was my changed attitude.
Jeff Iorg:So when I challenge you to take careful stock of the health of your church,
Jeff Iorg:to bring some critical conversation or analysis or consideration to its factors that are revealing of its health, I want to caution you, don't hear me saying
Jeff Iorg:that I want you to become a church critic or that I want you to criticize your church.
Jeff Iorg:So now let's talk about some ways to do this more, in a more healthy fashion, some ways to measure church health. Now I wanna start by saying that I think it is important that you have data to look at about things going on in your church. Now most churches keep up with what I call the big numbers, and those are the attendance numbers and the financial numbers, and those are not bad things to keep up with. But just keeping up with attendance and offering amounts is far too simplistic of a way to use as a standard of measuring ultimate church health. Now, again, I think churches should keep careful records of what they do.
Jeff Iorg:And in fact, I'd like to have more information, not less, about a church if I'm trying to analyze its overall health. I think you should keep careful records of numerical growth and progress in multiple areas, keeping it by age group, keeping it by timeframe, keeping it by program participation. I think it's important to keep a lot of good information about participation in these different ways and on these different levels. I want churches to grow as large as practically possible, and I want them to measure that growth as they're going, and I have zero problem with any of that as a part of understanding what makes a church healthy. However, having said that, it's very important that you learn how to interpret data in context and also that you learn how to interpret data in light of trends and of details that may be buried in the data.
Jeff Iorg:Now let me give you some examples of what
Jeff Iorg:I mean and then I'll give you some illustrations of how to do it. I once worked with a church that, had lost 67 members, 67 members in one year. This church was, in an Oregon Coast community. It
Jeff Iorg:had at 1.5 plywood mills. Now for those of you who aren't familiar with the lumber industry, there's timber industry, there's a logging industry, and then there's the places where they turn the logs into products, and sometimes it's into board, lumber boards, other kinds
Jeff Iorg:of things. But a big, big industry is plywood. And in this particular town, for lots of different reasons, it was kind
Jeff Iorg:of a plywood center, if you will. And there were about five different factories there, different companies that were making plywood. But, the Oregon environmental policies changed, economy changed, needs changed, and over time, one by one, those mills closed until finally all five of them were gone. And that final year, when the fifth one closed, this church lost 67 members. Now, that was just the final year.
Jeff Iorg:This church had been in a pattern of losing members every time one of these mills closed and people moved away from the community looking for
Jeff Iorg:family supporting jobs, this church lost members. But here's the remarkable thing. Over that stretch of years when those five mills were closing, including the final year when they lost 67 members who moved away from the community, the attendance of this church remained the same. Now, if
Jeff Iorg:you were looking at the attendance numbers in an annual somewhere that Baptist put together, you'd see the name of
Jeff Iorg:this church and you'd see for five to seven years the same attendance every year. And some people would say, well, that church was plateaued. It wasn't growing, but it was. This church was actually growing in remarkable ways because it was continuing to reach people in a declining community and replace people who were leaving at about the same pace all through those years. I knew this pastor of this church fairly well, and I told him once, yours your church should be written up in a church growth journal somewhere as a model of effectiveness in ministry.
Jeff Iorg:This is
Jeff Iorg:what I mean by you have to look at numbers in context. It's not enough to just look at a church's attendance. You have to look at that attendance in a context. And in this particular case, this church, this remarkable church had continued to reach people and grow and sustain itself in the face of significant economic decline and, community abandonment. What a remarkable story.
Jeff Iorg:Here's another one. I worked with another church that over a period of years baptized in a five year time frame, baptized about 600 people. That's remarkable. That's over a 100 people a year.
Jeff Iorg:But what's even more remarkable, this happened in a county, in a county that only had a population of about 10,000 people. Now you think about that. They're baptizing a few over a 100 people a year for five consecutive years, 600 people total in a county of 10,000 people. So when I was studying about this and thinking about it, I thought, well, what would that look
Jeff Iorg:like if it happened in a bigger place? So I thought 10,000. What would it look like if it happened in
Jeff Iorg:a place where there was 1,000,000 people? So I did a
Jeff Iorg:little fast, search and found out that San Jose, California, at the time of this story occurred, had about a million people population. I did the math. If that same growth rate had happened in San Jose, it would have accounted for 60,000 conversions and baptisms. 60,000. Can you imagine that?
Jeff Iorg:So what I'm saying is this first church that I mentioned with the 600 baptisms, not any imaginary one in San Jose, that's a remarkable, remarkable church growth story. To have that kind of growth in that kind of context is a significant church growth experience.
Jeff Iorg:Now, I said you have to set numbers in their context, but you also have to set them, in terms of the trends that they might demonstrate. So for example, when you look at
Jeff Iorg:a number in isolation, it may not tell you much, but if you can look at numbers over a three or five or seven year time frame, they might give you a much better indication of the overall health of a church or some program or aspect or component of a church. Looking at the overall trajectory over a period of time, the trends, if you will. Now I I believe in this trend way of analyzing things so much that when I was a church planter, I actually invented a statistic. Now this statistic that I invented really only works best in in small churches or in church plants because once you get up to a very large church, it it it is an you're not able to do what I'm about to describe. But when we
Jeff Iorg:first planted our church, we started with about, I remember on our
Jeff Iorg:first Sunday we had 92 people and four weeks later we had 46. Okay? And I remember thinking, okay, 92 to 46, that's half. I got four weeks it took me to get to here. Got four more weeks, I'm gonna be at zero.
Jeff Iorg:That's kind of how it was trending at that point. But that's not the trend I want to point out to you. Instead, when we started our church, we we were small enough that we could sit down on Sunday afternoon and make a list of every person who was present that morning. Now, we'd simply do a head count on Sunday morning if there were 63 people there. Then on Sunday afternoon, my associate and I that are working together to plant the church, we'd just either get on the phone with each other or sit down together and say, okay, let's make
Jeff Iorg:the list. And we would make
Jeff Iorg:a list of every person who'd been present that morning. And let's say the first Sunday we had 60 people, and so we had 60 names on our list. Now the following Sunday, we would again do the same thing. Let's say we had 62 people there. You say, well, you grew by two.
Jeff Iorg:No, no, no, no, no, no. That's too simplistic and that's not
Jeff Iorg:a trend. We'd look at the 62 and we'd write all
Jeff Iorg:the names down, but, here's a good thing. We had seven new people the second Sunday that weren't there the first Sunday. So we had seven new people the second Sunday. We do it the third Sunday. Let's say the third Sunday we had 65 people there.
Jeff Iorg:Well, now we say, well, we've grown by three. No. That's not the way to see it. We'd go back through, make a list of people, and we'd say, how many new people that didn't come the first week or the second week? How many came the third week?
Jeff Iorg:Well, there was five or six more people. And we would do this every month. So every month we came up with what we called a monthly cumulative attendance, an MCA, monthly cumulative attendance. And what we were trying to see was in a new church plan situation where the commitment level is low, where it's hard to get people to come even once a month, where you're dealing primarily with non Christians and people you're trying to reach with the gospel who have no allegiance to or pattern or habit of going to church, we wanted to
Jeff Iorg:see how many different individuals came to our worship service each month. And what we wanted to try to do was not get caught up in the week to week attendance, which
Jeff Iorg:was up and down, up and down, up
Jeff Iorg:and down, but instead look for a trend. And the trend was this, did we have more people coming to our service each month than we did the previous month? Meaning the cumulative number of people, not the total headcount,
Jeff Iorg:but the cumulative number of individuals who came. That's why I say it's easy to do this in a church under 200. It's not so easy to do
Jeff Iorg:this in a church of 5,000. I mean, I understand that. But when you're just starting out, you've got
Jeff Iorg:to measure the right number in the right context. And for us, attendance was not the right number because we were a
Jeff Iorg:new church plant. People had no commitment to come to church. People were all over
Jeff Iorg:the map and their levels of involvement.
Jeff Iorg:But we knew that if we could track
Jeff Iorg:it month to month and say, how many people came to our church? How many different individuals were in our services each month. And here's what we did and what proved the health in the early years of our church. We never had a month of decline.
Jeff Iorg:Now, hear me carefully. We had, we definitely had Sundays of decline. Oh man, attendance up and down, up
Jeff Iorg:and down, up and down. But when we totaled the monthly cumulative attendance, in other words, the number of different individuals who came to our church on a monthly basis,
Jeff Iorg:it went up every month. So first month, maybe 50, next month, maybe 62, next month, 68, you get the idea. What that told us was despite the unpredictability of attendance,
Jeff Iorg:we were moving in the right direction because the trend was we were attracting more and more people, more and more new people, more and more people who'd never been with us before to our worship services. Something was happening in a positive way to connect with the people we were trying to reach with the gospel. This is what I mean by looking at a number in context and with trends that actually reveal what you're really trying to measure. And a third aspect of looking at numbers is not only the context and the trends,
Jeff Iorg:but the details. The details. What do these numbers really tell you? So for example,
Jeff Iorg:let's say that your church baptized 14 people last year. And you say, well, that's good. That's 14 people that came to know Jesus and came into his kingdom and were baptized. That's fantastic. Nobody's mad about that.
Jeff Iorg:But what about the details? How old were those people? Did a little deeper digging and found out that 11 of them were children 12. Again, not one thing wrong with that. That's great news, but it does raise the question.
Jeff Iorg:Why aren't we reaching teenagers and why are we not reaching adults? Yeah, we
Jeff Iorg:had 14 baptisms, but who were they? And then where did they come from? Well, they mostly came from Vacation Bible School. Again, a very good thing.
Jeff Iorg:But then that raises the question, if that's the most important evangelistic event that we're doing each year, then number one, are
Jeff Iorg:we putting enough emphasis on it because it's so productive for us? But then number two, what else are we not doing that nothing else is really reaching people besides this one project we do in the summer. Now, this is just one example of trying to look at trends. Baptisms, where'd the baptisms come from? I was teaching on church growth at a church not long ago, and I I asked this question.
Jeff Iorg:I said, how healthy is your church? And people were like, well, we're we're pretty healthy. We're we're pretty good. I said, okay. Let me just ask you a couple questions.
Jeff Iorg:I said, first of all, did you have more people on your campus last Sunday under age six or over age 60? Well, what do you mean? I said, I was just asking you to think about not just the total attendance of how many people came,
Jeff Iorg:but who came? Man,
Jeff Iorg:they went and did the math and came back and said, our church is old. I said, yeah, I know. What can we do about that? They had to face up to the reality that while they had a good strong attendance, it was predominantly an older congregation of people,
Jeff Iorg:not very many under six, but a whole lot 60. Now again, there's nothing wrong with that. Hey, I'm 60. I want to be at church and I
Jeff Iorg:want my crowd to be there,
Jeff Iorg:but I'm not anybody's future. And if a church doesn't have a good understanding of having people under age six, and of course they don't bring themselves, meaning their young parent families who are with them, a church doesn't have a future. This is what I mean when I say you have to look at numbers, first of all, in context, and then second, with trends, and third, into the detail.
Jeff Iorg:And it's not just attendance and baptisms. This same kind of thing applies in finance. When I was a pastor, I I didn't track individual giving and ask how much did these people give and did they give more or less last year. No. I I wanted more broad trends in a bigger context.
Jeff Iorg:And so I would ask this question, how many families in our church how many different families gave anything at all to our church in the last three years and compare those numbers. And if I saw that more families were giving each year, it told me that we were growing in our financial base because more people were joining the giving team, if you will. I'd also ask this question. How many families gave regularly? Not how much they gave.
Jeff Iorg:They may have only given $25 a week, but they gave regularly. They were giving every week or giving every month. They gave regularly. And I'd want to know that because that would also tell me about the responsibility I had to develop people into the discipline
Jeff Iorg:of giving. Then another question I would ask of the finances is,
Jeff Iorg:how many families at some point during the year stopped giving? And that tells me that something either happened in their family, something happened in a relationship to the church, or something is happening with them spiritually that may need to be addressed. Now, if I'm looking at that and it's only a few, maybe I don't have a problem, but if I look at it and there's a large number, then perhaps that does speak to me about a difficulty that I need to address.
Jeff Iorg:This is what I mean, again, when I say you have to
Jeff Iorg:look at numbers in context, you have to look at them as a part of a trend, and you have to look at them in more detail before they make sense in determining the health
Jeff Iorg:of an organization. I'll just put it this way. Every now and every so often, I have
Jeff Iorg:to go in and get lab tests. I've, you know, I've had several health challenges over the years, I take a lot of medication. You you know some of you know that story. But that means I have to go in and get my blood checked and get tested. They send me the results almost immediately.
Jeff Iorg:It's a wonderful thing these days. Technology makes those blood tests pop right up on your screen. And, it'll say, on this particular scale, you're a 7.8.
Jeff Iorg:So what in the world does that mean? But then they give
Jeff Iorg:me the information. They say, this is how you compare. This is where you rank. This is where the context of what's normal and what's abnormal. And when I see the number in context, I see the number as a part of a trend of my health over the last decade and I see the detail, meaning it breaks down to the specifics of who I am and where I am right now, then that number makes sense to me and becomes a good diagnostic for my overall health.
Jeff Iorg:So when I talk about using data and combining that with subjective, observation, combining it with your own perspective on leadership and what's happening, these are
Jeff Iorg:the kinds of things I'm asking you to do. Thinking about church health is about thinking about data and information and understanding that, however, in context, looking at trends, digging into the details. And in doing that, asking yourself what's really happening, what really needs to change,
Jeff Iorg:what does this really tell me about the overall health of my church, and how can I begin to address it? Now, it's also important to measure some things that maybe aren't numerically observable. Like, for example, is our church growing in its capacity for prayer? Is our church growing in its capacity for missions? Is our church growing in its discipleship and in its personal sanctification?
Jeff Iorg:Now these are things that you can measure somewhat by, by numbers, but they're also things that you measure by your observation, by your spiritual intuition, and by your perspective as a leader, and by your experience as a leader. Don't discount those things. God has brought you to where you are, given you the experiences you've had, given you the perspective that you've achieved and that you've come to, and you can make those kinds of observations, but I'm gonna ask you to make them not just speculatively out of thin air,
Jeff Iorg:so to speak, but based on what
Jeff Iorg:you understand the data maybe tells you about what's happening and then how you look at it and how you're able to piece together, what this means for you. So for example, if you said, I wonder, is our church growing in its missions commitment? Well, you might say, well, when we've had missions events, these have been the attendance over the last three years. And when we've had missions giving, this has been the giving over the last several years. And when we've had missions going, sending out people on mission projects, this has been what's happening.
Jeff Iorg:And when I look at these things, I see the progress, but I also factor in not just those numerical trends and in that context, those detailed numbers, but also factor in the life stories of transformation that people have told in testimonies when they come back from mission trips. The way people have described to me how God has intervened in their lives and changed them and shaped them and made them into different people. The testimonies they're sharing in public worship services and Sunday school classes and in small group Bible studies about God's work in their lives while on mission. These things matter too in measuring the overall health of your church. So today we've talked about measuring church health, talked about using data to get it done, but putting that data in context, looking at trends, dealing with the details, and then combining that, but also using our observations, our intuition, and our sense of spiritual perspective to understand the overall health of the church that we lead.
Jeff Iorg:The purpose for doing this is not to become a critic. It's to do careful critique, taking a critical look so that we might strategically do what's necessary to enhance health. I want you to put it into practice this week as you lead on.