PP51 : The Most Important Metric
Do church metrics ever get on your nerves? Sometimes we keep them and never do anything with them. Or we don’t know how they actually help and can give greater clarity towards ministry.
In this episode of Productive Pastor I want to share with you a metric I think is absolutely vital and how it works alongside average worship attendance to help leadership understand a bit more about how their church might be growing.
Active Adults
The Active Adult metric is an objective understanding of ALL of the active adults in your church. This matters because Sunday attendance is no longer the best way to understand who is committed to the mission of your church. And for churches who want (or need) to have a growth conversation, active adults helps give the best clarity towards what size culture the church is currently in.
I almost always measure Active Adults as anyone who is giving, in a discipleship group, or serving. Any combination of the 3. I love using Planning Center to track all of these numbers as well. If you use the companion modules, you can set it up to automatically run these database searches for you. In many situations, a church might have 35-50% more Active Adults than it has in Sunday worship.
Do you see how helpful this might be?
So here is a quick case study from the episode to show how comparing active adults and average attendance helps tell a story.
You’ve gone in and done the work to understand (objectively) who your active adults are. You discern you currently have 115 in your church and your worship service currently averages 78 in attendance. This gives you a percentage of 68%.
And that’s enough data to start working towards growing.
The 3 options are three different situations that might arise from your work and three narratives it tells you.
Option 1
Sunday worship attendance goes up, but you haven’t integrated anyone new into your congregation really. You “grew” in theory, but not really. Your percentage went up to 81%, but this is a false sense of health.
Option 2
Your attendance really didn’t go up that much, but your active adult number increased significantly. This might have been through integrating new people (tracking new visitors and their assimilation will really tell you) or existing members in the church becoming more active. Your engagement percentage actually went down to 51%.
Both of these show a level of numerical increase, but not really that much growth.
Option 3
You work hard on existing church culture and inviting and integrating new people. Worship increases to 115 and you have 140 active adults. The engagement percentage increases to 82%. At this point, I would say you have gotten the leg up over a wall and begun to see some healthy and sustainable increase.