Measuring what matters: What metrics are really important to a local church?

For decades, you could walk into a “neighborhood church” and near the front of the sanctuary there would be a “hymn board” on that wall that posted the following:

• • The Sunday morning attendance for last Sunday.
  • The amount of the offering last Sunday.
  • And the page numbers in the hymn book of the songs to be sung that morning.

The page numbers for the hymn books was to help with the “flow” of the service, but the attendance and offering received were considered to be vital metrics.

In fact, for decades, things like Sunday morning attendance and the amount of offering received was considered the most important metrics to be measured in a church. And for decades, you can bet church leaders were measuring their local congregations by those numbers.

But now that the pandemic has significantly reduced attendance and messed up the overall way we have usually “done church” for decades, church leadership “gurus” have been scampering to rethink what metrics church leaders should use in our “new normal” for gauging the “health” of a local congregation.

Maybe it’s time we actually measure some things that are genuinely important to any local church. I’m not saying attendance and offerings don’t have their measure of importance, but there are several other things that directly reflect the spiritual health of a local church. I’ll suggest a dozen of those things. Your local church probably isn’t a spiritually healthy church if:

Your pastor is the only person in your local church who is competent to teach the Bible. I’ve watched numerous churches who struggle to recruit people to lead Sunday school classes or home groups because of a scarcity of members who are competent to teach the Bible. Many pastors turn to packaged curriculums and, especially, video teaching from popular ministers, theologians, and Bible teachers so they can just recruit someone to “facilitate a group” — meaning, someone to start a video, or lead people through a curriculum and ask, “What does this passage of scripture mean to you?” (bad question!). It’s understandable that a new church plant may initially not have many people beyond church staff who are capable and competent to teach the Bible, but with real and adequate discipleship, that should change. To go years, even decades, claiming there’s no one other than the pastor who is spiritually mature enough to take their Bibles and rightly teach from them is a glaring indicator that this is not a healthy church.

For years or decades you don’t have anyone biblically qualified to serve as elders and/or deacons. Again, this is a common issue during the early days of a new church plant, but if years, even decades later, you still claim only the pastor is biblically qualified to be an elder, then you have a serious failure of discipleship in your church, and that isn’t healthy.

Your members don’t have biblical worldviews. God accepts us as we are, but He transports us from the kingdom of darkness into His kingdom of light (Col. 1:13) and begins the work of transforming us by renewing our minds (Rom. 12:2, Eph. 4:23), changing us over a lifetime to be more and more like Jesus and so that we can have the “mind of Christ” (1 Cor. 2:16, Phil. 2:5). But if we still have a secular worldview, rather than a biblical worldview, that should be an obvious red flag that your local congregation isn’t spiritually healthy.

Your members aren’t equipped and competent in sharing the Gospel with non-Christians. The mission of the church is to make new disciples, and then teach those disciples (Mt. 28:18-20) and equip them for ministry (Ephesians. 4:11-12), and that mission is carried out by each member serving as an ambassador for Jesus Christ (2 For. 5:18-20). If your members haven’t been (or aren’t being) equipped to carry out the mission of the church in their appointment as ambassadors, you don’t have a spiritually healthy church because you’re missing the mission — as a church body, and as ambassadors.

Your members don’t share the Gospel with non-Christians. You can teach, equip, and train your members in every known evangelistic tool, method, and technique known to man, but if they actually don’t use their training because they’re uninterested in the spiritual condition of the lost, then you don’t have a spiritually healthy church.

Your members are biblically illiterate. It astounds me how some church leaders try to make all kinds of excuses for the biblical illiteracy of their congregation. The fact is, God most reveals Himself — and specifically, personally, directly reveals Himself — to us through the Bible; you cannot really know God if you don’t know anything of scripture. So, if your congregation is biblically illiterate, you don’t have a spiritually healthy church.

Your members don’t demonstrate love for one another and serve one another. Christians are commanded to love God first, and then to love others, but also to very specifically to love their brothers and sisters in Christ. In fact, Jesus Himself says our love for one another is a proof that we are His disciples (John 13:34-35, 1 John 4:20-21, Gal. 5:13). If your congregation doesn’t demonstrate love for one another, you don’t have a healthy church.

Your members think they are constrained in being able to, in appropriate ways, express themselves in worship. If there’s a tension to conform to “worshiping” in a church service in certain ways, and members feel like they can’t express their love, adoration, and praise of God authentically without being criticized or judged, then you don’t have a spiritually healthy church (and you likely don’t really have a “worship” service).

Your members don’t financially support the mission of the church as they are capable of doing. In this case, your members either have a gross lack of knowledge understanding about being stewards of all God provides them with, and their role and responsibility in the local church, or they have an even more serious spiritual issue of being unwilling to part with some of their worldly resources in service to the church and the kingdom of God. Whatever the reason, this issue is a clear indication that you don’t have a spiritually healthy church.

Evangelism and discipleship aren’t the real top priorities of the congregation. Jesus came to seek and save the lost (Lk. 19:10), and as His ambassadors, we are specifically appointed to carry on that mission (2 Cor. 5:18-20). If that isn’t the real priority of a congregation — not just church staff, but the congregation — then you don’t have a spiritually healthy church.

Baptisms are rare in your church. I’m not saying you need to be baptizing someone every Sunday, but there’s a problem if it’s so rare that someone is baptized that’s it’s a surprise to the congregation. In His commission to the church, Jesus instructs us to go make disciples, and then baptize them. Baptisms are a clear measure that a local church is carrying out its mission of making disciples. So, if baptisms are rare, you likely do not have a spiritually healthy church.

Biblical hospitality isn’t a common practice among your church members. Hospitality was a distinguishing characteristic of the New Testament church, and scripture implores us to make it a common practice in our followership of Jesus (e,g., Mt. 25:34-46, Ro. 12:13, Heb. 13:1-2, 1 Tim. 3:2, Titus 1:8, 1 Pet. 4:9, etc.). If your members do not practice hospitality, you don’t have a spiritually healthy church.

This isn’t an exhaustive list of important measures of a spiritually healthy church, but they are key measures. How is your local congregation doing with each of these? What other ways would you suggest the Bible indicates can be a measure of the spiritual health of a church?

Scotty