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Building Evaluative Muscles

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. In this month’s series, we are excited to share some sneak peeks of NEXT Church’s forthcoming “Field Guide for Cultivated Ministry,” alongside articles and stories that reflect on the importance of mindfulness, discernment, and learning as crucial to the flourishing of ministry. We can’t wait to share the whole thing with you this fall! We invite you to share your own thoughts on Facebook and Twitter! 

by Shannon Kershner

Two years ago at our annual session retreat, congregational leaders at Fourth Presbyterian Church discerned God was calling us to make discipleship a priority in the life and mission of our particular congregation. We decided it was time to intentionally focus on nurturing and growing our sense of God’s claim on our lives and life together, as well as our ability to articulate the difference that claim made in our lives. As a congregation, we have always felt strongly called to work for God’s justice and compassion in the world, but we have not always been able to articulate why. The session decided it was time to help all of us give words as to why we did what we did. It was time to help our folks be able to describe what made us, as a congregation, different from other non-profit agencies who did similar community outreach work. We felt God was challenging us to work on a deeper sense of discipleship.

As we continued to wrestle with what that meant (including trying to define discipleship!), we began to get stuck on how we would know if we were making progress. What were the metrics we could use to see if we were actually doing what we said we felt called to do? We knew that we could not just use the church’s operating budget or our worship attendance numbers to tell us if the discipleship priority was taking hold. Both financial health and attendance statistics provide useful data, but neither thing captures “success” – at least not in terms of ministry. And yet, those kinds of quantitative metrics were all we had.  

I was always reminded of this point whenever elders who had rolled off session would want to hear how things were going. “How are we doing with our discipleship priority?” they would ask. “Are you seeing some shifts occur?” Being a preacher, I always came up with something to say, but I also felt inadequate to describe the progress I saw taking place. I had a variety of anecdotes I could tell them, in which I could describe how I saw our baptisms shining brightly, but I did not know if that “counted,” in terms of metrics… until NEXT Church launched the Cultivated Ministry project.

Our session took the Cultivated Ministry method out for a spin this past June at our last annual retreat. I will admit it was a little rocky in the beginning. Some of my folks needed to be convinced that the traditional ways of measuring healthy ministry via budgets and attendance were actually meant to be inputs rather than outputs. In other words, a church’s financial resources and people resources are means to an end and not the “end” itself (hint—the end is God’s complete reconciliation of the cosmos). It is a shift to recognize that people’s stories of transformation are just as valid as how many people showed up. We have been counting for so long that other ways of describing progress can feel suspicious or threatening. However, the more we practiced broadening our vision as to what/how to measure “successful” ministry, the more it began to feel right. We have a long way to go, but we have gotten started.

Our next steps will be to keep practicing the Cultivated Ministry method with small, well-defined ministry programs. It is still difficult to measure how we are doing regarding deepening our discipleship, but we can become more adept at these new metrics if we start with smaller tasks. For example, we can use this method to see how our new family neighborhood small groups are working  Or we could use this method to look at a new mission trip. Or we could use this method to evaluate our session meetings or our trustee meetings. There are a myriad of different ways we could implement Cultivated Ministry metrics as we build our evaluative muscles.  

I am thankful for the group who gave this work all of their time, energy, imagination, and love. I get excited to imagine how this different way of measuring healthy ministry might take root in the congregation I serve. It feels faithful and interesting. And I believe it has the potential to keep us from getting too comfortable or stagnant. The practice of Cultivated Ministry will help us grow deeper in our discipleship and more articulate about how our faith impacts our life. We are going to keep working at it, undoubtedly messing up and trying again, as we try to figure out how to scale it for our different ministries and mission. I hope other congregations will join us in the experimenting!

Shannon Johnson Kershner is the senior pastor of Fourth Presbyterian Church (P.C.U.S.A.). She grew up in Waco, Texas as the daughter of a Presbyterian minister and an elementary school teacher. Shannon stayed in Texas for college and graduated in 1994 from Trinity University in San Antonio. In 1996, she began her theological training at Columbia Theological Seminary and received her Masters of Divinity degree in 1999. Her sermons and articles have been published in a number of journals, including The Journal for Preachers and Lectionary Homiletics. She is involved in leadership for NEXT Church and serving on its strategy team. Shannon is married to Greg, whom she met in high school at a Presbyterian summer conference at Mo-Ranch. They have been married for 21 years and are the parents of 15-year-old Hannah and 12-year-old Ryan.  

Evangelicalism as Community Problem-Solving

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Each month, we post a series of blogs around a common topic. This month, Andrew Kukla is curating reflections on being evangelical in the church. Have we connected our congregations to resurrection life? Have we taught them how to talk about it?  How to live it? How to connect others to that life-giving, life-abundant power? We invite you to join the conversation on Facebook and Twitter!

by Wyatt Schroeder

The offering plate sits in my lap. I wonder if the offertory volunteers notice my hesitation. I’m a guest at this church. I don’t know well enough the cause of the congregation. It hasn’t been made clear yet what problem my money is solving. Am I donating to accrue more members? Am I reaching in my pockets to address deferred maintenance? Is this assuaging my guilt? It’s not that I don’t understand how unrestricted dollars can impact the depth of our work; I understand all too well. I’m the executive director of a housing nonprofit in Boise, Idaho. Money fuels our mission and directly allows our case managers to end homelessness for over 200 people a year. Then why am I uncomfortable in the pews?

tsr_4422_webYour work in the church and my work in the streets intermingle and cross-pollinate. The New Evangelicalism, if we are comfortable with capital letters, is likely to be about causes, not creeds; to be about problem-solving and not moral rectitude. It will be about inviting a community conversation on community problems and not about creating a convert. I say this as a nonprofit professional and as a millennial. Yes, that cursed generation that is plaguing the graph of church membership and afflicting the comforting malaise of the status quo.

Often, a volunteer will shyly confess to me, “Wyatt, I’m uncomfortable asking for money.” My response is simple, but culturally significant: at our organization, we should not ask people for money, we should ask people to solve problems. This builds a covenantal relationship with supporters that recognizes their strengths, recognizes the need, and will continue to grow beyond any one transaction, handshake, or capital campaign. A covenant is a language that we’re familiar with—but one that seems reserved for our current congregants. Should we not have a covenant with our community at large, inviting congregants and non-congregants alike to join us in addressing community problems?

From my seat in the pew, evangelicalism became a sullied tradition because of confusion between outputs and outcomes. This is not a semantic point; instead it actualizes a severe disregard for building covenantal relationships. Our efforts, both as church and as social-justice leaders, in the old evangelical model were about bean counting: member rolls, dollars raised, dollars donated to local charities, and hours of religious education delivered. Our success was determined by the number of souls recruited. It was, to my mind, never about the outcomes that we could achieve together for the benefit of our community.

This misstep also plagues the nonprofit sector. I notice it in the 15-minute presentations to local Rotary or Kiwanis Clubs, where a nonprofit shares a three-minute story of a client’s success and then details how their seven programs could use my support. At no point did they educate me on the community need. Sure, it’s implied that if the organization exists then it must be addressing a need, but it’s output-thinking. Instead, we should use all 15 minutes to educate about the problem that we’re addressing. “Lead with the need,” as one mentor used to tell me. When we share based on our intended outcomes, a beautiful thing happens: it forces a conversation about how our values are put into action. Outputs are about the mechanics of our work; outcomes are about how our vision transforms a family, a mother, a child. “Let’s raise $3,000 for this month’s plate partner” becomes “let’s increase childhood wellness by reducing family homelessness.”  

If we only implore others to join us in addressing outputs—I’m picturing your annual-fund campaign thermometer posted in the narthex—then our work will not resonate with a millennial generation that is less interested in membership than in revolutions. But if we discuss outcomes, then the offering plate becomes an invitation to community problem-solving. And in this new language of evangelicalism, we will invite a covenantal relationship that will empower people’s strengths to be levied for a greater purpose.

Wyatt head shotWyatt Schroeder (@wvschroeder) serves as the Executive Director for CATCH, Inc. He is responsible for the strategic management, fund development, storytelling, and program success of the organization. A native of Pennsylvania, Wyatt holds an M.B.A. from Villanova University (Philadelphia, PA) and a B.A. from Allegheny College (Meadville, PA). While serving in AmeriCorps with Rebuilding Together, Wyatt found the passion of his life: ending homelessness. Wyatt is committed to building sustainable organizations around innovative housing models, such as Housing First, while never forgetting to share the powerful stories of those we are serving.