Have you ever thought about your ministry having a Return on Investment or ROI before? If you haven't then I would encourage you to at least think about it. If you have then how do you measure the return? How do you measure the investment?
In advertising the ROI can be figured out. You can hire consulting firms or Nielsen or a host of people to figure out how much you are spending on advertising and how much of that advertising is gaining you customers and ultimately money. They can even tell you which customers are spending the most money and which ad is the most helpful to get those customers. This is of course very important in times like this where the economy is not the best and people are reluctant to spend their money. So you want to make sure that your investment of advertising is going to work.
What does this have to do with ministry? If we were to hire an outside company to come in and measure your return on the ministry that you are doing/providing/equipping/modeling/(whatever you call it) then what would they find? Now most of this will depend on what church you are in but most the returns can be measured. This is not suppose to be or intended to be a numbers game. I am not trying to say that the biggest church in town wins because they have more people. The biggest church in town maybe spending lots and lots of money and seeing very little return compared to the church down the street who grew by 50%. Growth in numbers is important but it can't be the only return can it?
Some churches measure how many baptisms they have in a given year as the return. Others measure how many volunteers they have increased over a time frame. Still some strictly base it on the weekend attendance compared to last year.
Then you have the task of trying to measure the growth of someone's spirituality and this is where it gets hard. Just because it is hard though doesn't mean that you don't try and measure it. To many times we as church staff try and explain this away because it is hard or we don't even look at it because it can be confusing. I believe we fall short here.
I believe that you have to able to qualify and quantify what you are doing as a ministry. I believe that you have to be able to have some sort of ROI. In your ministry what are you measuring? How do you know when you are doing well? What does a win look like?
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2 Responses to "Ministry Monday: Return on Investment""Then you have the task of trying to measure the growth of someone's spirituality and this is where it gets hard."
That's really the only thing that matters.
It's the same way in higher education, people look at "growth" and don't ask "is it statistically significant"? If our enrollment is up 1% or our incoming students' average SAT scored are up .2 points, people say "that's great!" It drives me crazy.
I would love to be a church administrator just to make fun powerpoints showing that the church is growing in numbers but shrinking as a % of the surrounding population, etc.
Great thoughts! I think if we are not thinking in these terms then we are being poor stewards of the time and talents God has put us over. We must constantly be challenging and evaluating why and how we do things. It's human nature to just coast. I've been in the church long enough to know that numbers aren't the end all for evaluating success. The main thing our team looks at is fruit. Is the person, the ministry, the team, producing fruit? Yeah 100 may have gotten saved or baptized but is anyone producing fruit. Are our kids being fruitful? Are our parents being fruitful? Christ says all that are not will be cut off. I guess you can say our goal is to be fruitful and multiply.
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