This grew out of a Voices discussion on “turn around” churches.
Part of the difficulty in church work is figuring out how to evaluate what is going on? Churches are complex communities and it is easy to be reductive in terms of what we are paying attention to. Here are some of the questions I posted:
I think it’s helpful to ask ourselves (as I did Dawn) what specifically are we looking for? What are the markers that we are using to evaluate? “turning around” has beneath it a judgment involving performance.
Are we looking for? What are our metrics?
1. more people attending presentations (attractional worship services)? Are some of them taking the step towards official membership?
2. more money being donated (that’s easy to count)?
3. more people volunteering for programs?
4. more people who are involved (the first three) inviting friends to attend, donate, volunteer, affiliate?
Are some of our metrics less easily countable?
1. are people more excited?
2. Is there a sense that people are making different decisions in their lives as a result of their presence in the community and activities of the church?
3. how is participation in the church community impacting people’s sense of wellbeing?
4. how is participation in the church community impacting people’s relationships? Are marriages getting more joyful? Is there forgiveness and reconciliation? Are people doing better at loving enemies?
5. how is participation in the church community bringing more joy to people’s lives? Are they able to find joy in suffering, enduring loss while still gaining in generosity, bringing comfort and encouragement to each other?
6. how is participation in the church community helping give people more specific understandings of why they should feel joy in suffering?
7. how is participation in the church community helping give people articulate the gospel in ways that are understandable and valuable not only to themselves but help them communicate what it is about to their neighbors?
There are also external community impact questions
1. Is the church community improving the lives in tangible ways of those who are not involved in the church but live in the geographic vicinity?
2. Is the church helping the poor in the neighborhood?
3. Is the church bringing comfort to people in the neighborhood that are suffering?
4. Is the church providing infrastructure for the neighborhood to serve it’s own people better?
We tend to look at the first group, but the rest of the list is probably more where the action is, and the performance of the first group is probably dependent on the rest of the list.
Leadingchurch.com 
Great article, Paul. Its a great catch-22, because using standardized metrics to measure something that is much more of a “church character” issue. The problem is that, if we lose the metrics, then every lazy pastor and their uncle will say they’ve created “health” without bumping the metrics and suddenly we have no tool for evaluation.
We’ve bumped up against this at our church, simply because we’re changing our own metrics for what we expect – Sunday morning attendance is not our primary goal, but that muddies things really quickly.
At YALT, we’re trying to do the same thing to highlight some churches in the CRC who ARE doing a good job at engaging young adults. Turns out that its much more about character than what they do (making a consultant’s job REALLY difficult). Our solution? We’re going to use 10-12 minute short films to tell the stories of the church, which we hope will be more than a “highlight reel” of what they do and more of the viewer being sucked into the culture for 12 minutes and they noticing the differences in the “feel” of their own context.
Tough one, for sure. My thought is that it has A LOT to do with leadership – unhealthy leaders in good contexts will tank the thing ever time – healthy leaders in bad contexts turn things around. We need to fix how we “health up” our leaders (especially pastors).