Soon after I finished studying at theological college, I was hit with some bad news: my father had fallen terminally ill. He’d invested a lot in me so, when he approached me to help with a succession plan for his company, I was only too willing to help. I got on board and got stuck in. I was unaware of it at the time, but rubbing my theological training up against a business environment flagged a big gap in my formal training: leadership and management. So, when I saw Graham touching on ministry evaluation I got excited.

I’ve noticed the trend Graham points to, of people offering attendance stats when asked about the ministries they’re involved in, but I wanted to offer a different perspective on why they do that. I’m of the opinion that people do this because they don’t have better tools to evaluate their ministries. Don’t get me wrong, I think most people who read this will have a framework for what makes a ministry distinctly Christian, but I haven’t seen many work that out into something that can answer the question, “How’s it going?” So, we default to the situation Graham describes.

We’re ill-equipped here because our formal training wasn’t trying to prepare us to analyse the complex organism that is the local church. A lot of church leadership requires management skills, and management skills aren’t what a theological college is trying to instil. That’s not to say we’re ignorant of the deficiency – quite the contrary! I think this partly explains why we get so excited when someone like Andrew Heard comes along: he offers a deployable package, in the 5Ms, that holds together theological and practical awareness. Even those who want to argue with him usually do so over whether his theological focus is unbalanced or errant, not whether his approach to managing God’s household is useful or correct.

So, over the next few posts, I want to share a few thoughts on ministry evaluation. What do you think would be worth touching on?

Read part 2 (on the need for a scoreboard) here.