“For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.”
Challenge Ten: The Core Team Adopts Vague, Imposed, or Poorly Discerned Progress Metrics
In the past I’ve worked with many teams attempting to start churches in post-Christian environments. Oftentimes, these teams prioritized the need to listen, connect, and serve in their respective settings, but gave scant attention to setting targets for ecclesial development. This cultivating of relationships with people outside the church, with the intent to disciple them in the way of Jesus, was commendable. And people did come to faith. What was less commendable with these initiatives (and we as overseeing leaders bear responsibility for allowing this) was their reticence to set measurable goals to enhance the sustainability and maturing of their forming expressions of church. A number of teams seemed to view the intentional defining of progress targets as an incumbrance to authentic grassroots experimentation. As a result, vast energies and finances went into projects that only ended up having the staying power of a few years at best. I believe that we could have curtailed that attrition had we helped teams articulate more appropriate and clearer progress targets.
None of us involved in church planting like to have sponsoring organizations breathing down our necks and checking up on our progress. “What do they know?!...We’re the ones on the ground building the plane as we fly it.” Yet most of us know innately that if we persistently operate with a fuzzy, generalized idea of what we’re aiming to become––in the next six months, year, two years––chances are we’ll eventually run into frustration on multiple levels.
We may suddenly feel the sting of certain unspoken or ignored metrics held by our sponsoring organization or sending church that tell us we’re not measuring up to expectations. Or, if that’s less of an issue, we may find ourselves plagued by an unhealthy degree of vision drift, over-reach and scattered hyperactivity, all of our own making. To be good stewards of the vision God has given us, we as leaders must adopt the practice of identifying and subjecting ourselves to prayerfully discerned, specific progress targets. This is a piece of the team leadership work we must not avoid.
Before going any further, let me say that I’m familiar with the push-back on the dangers of quantifying progress when so much of what we’re doing seems to defy measuring. I’m not talking about reducing the artful and intuitive leading that’s so generative in church planting, but rather giving greater attention to answering the question, “What might this thing we’re doing look like further down the road, if in fact it’s working––what evidence of progress would we hope to see?” With that in mind, let me offer some thoughts that I hope might help any startup team articulate its own “metrics for success” for any given stage of development.
Important considerations when setting progress targets:
What we measure is what we value. I once heard a pastor challenge his people to greater participation by presenting the harrowing statistic that only 67% of the body were involved in ministry. The more he spoke, the more I realized the metric he was espousing was really about the percentage of members who were serving in-house in church-sponsored programs. Later, I approached him and asked if he had counted all the stories and serving being racked up every day by church members ministering outside the programs of the church? He told me he had never thought of that. This helped me understand why the church had such a feeble commitment to helping members minister as agents of shalom in their daily lives and vocations.
Teams tend to reach their own articulated versions of success much better than someone else’s version. Overseeing agencies often impose their ideal metrics upon a project without enough regard for the grassroots metrics the startup team would like to pursue. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally appropriate for a sponsoring body to lay out its own generic benchmarks for measuring progress over time. But sponsors must also allow startups teams the prerogative to massage and even amend those organizational metrics so that the team embraces them as their own defined measures of progress.
By too rigidly defining metrics, oversight bodies can rob teams and communities of the growth that comes from wrestling with each other and God about what growth ought to look like. Leadership maturing happens in the struggle to discern hoped-for growth targets. In other words, it’s as much about the process of discerning metrics as it is about arriving at an agreed-upon set of metrics. Project overseers would do well to regularly encourage any steps toward progress and not only offer accolades when teams hit or exceed the agreed-upon progress targets.
Finding a good coach to help us move toward our progress targets is pure wisdom and can be very satisfying and fruitful. Internal coaches working for a sponsoring group can be a key go-between advocate to help team leaders stay true to both their own metrics AND to the clearly stated desired outcomes of the sponsor. This of course assumes that the sponsor does their work and articulates a set of generic progress indicators that are both germane to each phase of missional community maturing; and that are also commonly experienced by teams as they activate the dynamics of missional church planting movements (1).
Though progress metrics are important to communal development, it’s helpful for teams to continually rest in the reality that success in planting is not primarily about the results achieved. Faithfulness in doing our best to follow Jesus in the sloppy terrain of planting is the true metric for success (i.e. no failures in responding to the call, even if the plant doesn’t reach viability).
As starters we need room to push on anticipated and unanticipated doors of opportunity, and then walk through the ones God opens. This is another way of saying that not everything should be measured by someone else’s standard or ideal of progress. It may also be helpful to remind ourselves that even if our project doesn’t reach long-term sustainability, our innovating work can still offer a prophetic call to the existing body of Christ. Even if it’s only for a season, our attempts to tangibly live into God’s inbreaking reign may well end up being God’s way of stimulating other starters and other churches to trust the Spirit and step toward their own discerned, faith-stepping goals. Let’s honor both the risky journey of startup and also recognize that our movement toward appropriate, well-discerned progress metrics can only increase the likelihood of our project’s longer term viability and contribution toward God’s work in our city.
Some closing questions and a resource for discerning metrics:
Here’s a few questions we might consider regarding our own team’s growth aspirations: What specific targets (metrics for success) do we need to discern and articulate, so that we can measure progress over time? What time horizons will we base these on, and what evidences of progress do we hope to see for each of these horizons? Who will hold us accountable to our progress goals, and when will we talk about those? Who will we ask to come alongside us to help us stay true to our progress goals?
As mentioned, we in Communitas International (www.gocommunitas.org) noticed that far too many of our projects were floundering for years without ever gelling into sustainable forms of church. To address this alarming attrition, we as a wider community of church planters and sponsoring churches were compelled to identify the characteristics that any form of ecclesia tends to exhibit as it matures toward ecclesial adulthood. We came up with these “twelve hallmarks of maturing church,” which are essentially discernment benchmarks upon which teams can set their own targets for growth (2). We’ve since found that in any given season, two or three of the twelve hallmarks tend to be “live” issues for a given team, meaning that goals around those particular areas will often foster the growth needed for the immediate season ahead.
Notes:
These dynamics are described in very practical detail in the book, Dynamic Adventure: A Guide to Starting and Shaping Missional Churches, by Steigerwald, Loyd, Crull & Kuder (Centennial, CO: Communitas Int’l, 2017).
These twelve hallmarks of maturing ecclesia are expanded upon in the book, Grow Where You’re Planted: Collected Stories on the Hallmarks of Maturing Church, by Steigerwald & Crull (Portland, OR: CA Press, 2013).
written by Dan Steigerwald
Photo by Steve Halama on Unsplash
For more about Dan or to get in touch with him, visit: https://artesiaresourcing.com/about/