How do you define church success?

When I talk to pastors and people from other churches I will often ask them how things are going at church. I'll ask them what they feel is going well and what seems not to be going very well. I'm always interested by their comments. It tells me a lot about how they define success. It also tells me a lot about their priorities.

If you're in ministry and part of the Southern Baptist denomination you are familiar with the yearly church surveys the association sends out. They ask questions such as; what is your weekly average attendance for worship, how many people are in Sunday School, how many baptisms did you have last year, how much money did you contribute to cooperative giving, etc. These surveys haven't changed for decades! And worse yet they communicate to churches that these are the things that are most important if you want to have a healthy church.

We desperately need to change what we define as being success at church. One way to do this is to change the assessments administered by the associations to better reflect what we are hoping to create. If churches were asked things such as, "how many church members actively involve God in their daily life?" it would definitely challenge the leadership to focus on this topic. The problem is most churches can't answer that question because they don't know their congregations well enough to know how to answer it!

In addition, there is confusion as to what is success. Many people believe church success is how big your building is or how many programs you have running. For others it's how many people attend your church or the offering levels. None of this says anything about the spiritual wellness of the church. It only addresses the "wellness" of the organization. Our poor assessments and areas of focus have finally caught up to us and we are currently feeling the affects of them. We have big empty churches with spiritually dead people confused at why even though they attend church every Sunday or are involved in several programs at the church, they don't feel like their lives are meaningful or full. Something is still missing.

What would I encourage churches to do?
1. Redefine success to be how many times you had a real conversation with someone and shared a little bit of yourself with them.

2. Measure success on the number of times you consulted God on something before making a decision, no matter how small the decision and followed His direction.

3. Define success based on the amount of time spent each week devoted to one on one time with God.

4. Define success to be the personal efforts parents make to instruct their children in God's word, such as family devotionals or worship time.

5. Define success as being each time we choose to not engage in sinful acts.

6. And finally, define success as investing in another to develop the same godly characteristics.

I'm sure there are others... this is a list in progress! Any one want to add something to the list?