As as United Methodist statistics are my friend. In my conference we are pretty serious about our statistics. We keep track of how many people are coming to worship, Sunday school, short term classes, youth group, UMW, UMM, well...the list could continue. We use statistics as a measure of ministry. We believe we can know how well a pastor is doing and how well a church is doing ministry by looking at their statistics and comparing those to previous years.

What I have discovered is how what we measure determines how and what we do in ministry. When the measure of ministry is how many people come Sunday morning, I will spend time, energy and money in trying to get people to come Sunday morning. That is my goal. The more people who come, the more effective the ministry. If the measure is how many youths are in the youth group my focus is on the youth group and trying to get kids to come.

This all makes sense. If people coming to church is the most important thing in ministry we will spend time creating an inviting environment and then we will count and measure the result. If people stop coming, then we spend time discovering why so we can discover more effective ways to reach them and get them to come.

Our kinds of measurements are easy. They are objective. You do what you do...and then you count how many you did what you do to (or something like that). At the end of the year you can compare this year to last year and even set goals for next year. It all sounds good. It all seems right.

What if your goal isn't how many come Sunday morning, or Wednesday nights, but rather how well the church is being salt and light to the community? That is much harder to measure. You could measure how many people you have helped, or how many cans of food were distributed, but even that doesn't seem quite right. It is hard to measure how well you are being salt and light to the community.

Since it is difficult to measure a missional kind of ministry, we continue to track the same types of statistics. This can cause problems with determining true effectiveness. While some churches might be very effective in being salt and light to their community, it doesn't mean an increase in the type of statistics we track. In fact, it could me a decline! If church members miss Sunday morning to be in ministry in the community, what do you do? The church has to report statistics about how many show up Sunday morning. Do you encourage people to continue in the ministry knowing it will hurt 'the bottom line?' If so, some will believe the ministry isn't effective.

Coming to church might not be the best indicator for church ministry, especially if a church is trying to build on a missional foundation. Yet, since we continue to focus on worship attendance, churches will continue to pour money, effort, time, into Sunday morning worship, perhaps to the detriment to other community type ministries. Perhaps we are measuring the wrong things. Maybe we need to find ways to measure how well we are being salt and light in our communities. Could it be time to discover new ways to measure ministry? Is it time to find new ways to measure ministry? If what we measure determines what we focus on, perhaps it is time to throw out or statistics completely and allow God's spirit to determine our agenda and not our statistics.