Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

During his 38 years of ministry Dr. Bill Hoyt has served as Pastor, Seminary Professor, Executive Minister of the Southwest Baptist Conference and a consultant to churches, denominations and other not-for-profit corporations. His three pastorates were in Big Springs, South Dakota; Spring Lake Park, Minnesota; and Escondido, California. For 28 years Dr. Hoyt taught courses in preaching, worship and leadership at both the Minnesota and San Diego campuses of Bethel Theological Seminary. By virtue of his varied background, Dr. Hoyt has been privileged to observe countless churches from many different vantage points. His consulting has included a wide range of areas including leader development; spiritual formation; strategic ministry planning; governance structures and boardmanship; fund raising; conflict intervention and change agentry. Dr. Bill Hoyt is the President of NexStep Coaching and Consulting. NexStep is an organization committed to enhancing

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Effectiveness By The Numbers

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

Seems Like Everyone Counts

In most of life's arenas, counting and keeping score seem second nature. We teach toddlers numbers by counting objects. Counting is often a child's first verbal skill. My grandchildren love to count the blocks they pile, one on top of the other, before they knock them down. Skipping rope and counting successful jumps seem to go hand-in-hand.

Children and bored adults count the cars on the train while waiting for it to pass. As teenagers, some friends and I climbed to the top of the Washington Monument. I counted each stair so I could brag about my "monumental" feat! Walkers and runners wear pedometers so they will know how many steps or strides they take during their workout. The more compulsive types around us count just about everything.

We keep track of the pennies in our piggy banks and the dollars in our IRAs. Athletes count runs, touchdowns, baskets, and seconds. Business leaders keep track of customers, costs, inventory, and sales, among a myriad of other things. Gamblers count cards and figure odds. Gallup and other pollsters will count just about anything if someone wants to know and will pay.

In business, sports, and politics, success demands that people not only count, but also count the right things and count them accurately. If a business stops counting the right things accurately, bankruptcy looms in its future. In sports, coaches and managers keep stats, study them, and make adjustments based on them. If they do not, their jobs will soon be in jeopardy. Tony La Russa, manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, is viewed as one of baseball's all-time best managers. Coincidentally he was one of the first to use a laptop computer in the dugout.

People count whatever is important to them. We count the money in our wallets or purses. Students calculate their grade point average. Since parents are loath to lose children, the parents of five do frequent head counts at the mall.

Churches Count, Too. Well, Sort of ...

Failure to Count

Most churches count. Some do not, and not counting is always a bad sign. Not counting generally indicates they do not care or have given up. It's a little like children shooting hoops in the backyard with dad or mom. They know they can't win, so they want to play for fun. You know the tide is changing when they suddenly decide they want to keep score. That decision ushers in a period of close games with the parent still winning a good share of them. Then comes the stage when the parent is no longer interested in keeping score and wants to play for fun.

When doing a church assessment, we ask for statistics from the most recent ten-year period. Far too many churches struggle to assemble basic numbers like attendance, income, and baptisms. Gathering such elementary figures should never be a struggle unless the church has suffered a record-destroying fire, flood, or earthquake, or a crashed hard drive with no backup. Often the gaps in the data tell as much or more than the numbers themselves.

In my experience, the worse things are, the less people count. The more gaps in the data, the more bad years there have been. Keeping score was no longer fun, so they quit counting. When the statistics are bad and getting worse, they are depressing. Most people do not like feeling depressed. Making the changes necessary to reverse the negative trend can be difficult and requires giving up some things held dear by the church's long-timers. Since it is easier to stop counting than to make changes, they simply stop counting. Their inattention to numbers is a way of denying a reality they do not want to admit or address.

Lack of statistics for certain years sometimes indicates a kind of apathy. People counted and records were kept, but currently there is a new regime. The new pastor or new board did not care enough to protect the records and now they are lost. Or sometimes a long-time board that was unhappy with the former pastor will lose statistics, creating gaps in the records.

Since in our humanness we tend to count those things that matter most to us, most churches will at least count the offerings. They might not be able to tell you how many came to services, how many unbelievers became believers, how many participate in small groups, or how many serve in some form of ministry, but they can tell how much was given—and of course the amount given in these situations is never enough!

Failure to Count Accurately

Some churches count but do not do so accurately. Attendance figures are notoriously inaccurate. Since attendance is one of the things most frequently used to measure effectiveness, pastors and sometimes laypeople succumb to the temptation to count "everything that moves."

Over the years I have seen attendance figures that included not only worship but also Sunday school classes, the nursery, and even off-campus church retreats. Counting total Sunday attendance is neither bad nor unethical unless you compare your total Sunday attendance to your neighbor's worship only figure without disclosing the difference in methods.

There is a more common source of attendance inaccuracies found in churches with multiple worship services. The inflated attendance figures come when the same people are counted each time in multiple services. The same worship band, singers, worship leaders, ushers, greeters, and audio and video people often serve in multiple services.

Let's say on a given weekend a church has a team of six instrumentalists, six vocalists, two leaders for various aspects of worship, eight ushers, six greeters, two soundboard people, a slide projection operator, and the pastor running their worship services. That equals thirty-two people per service. If the same people serve in both services and are counted in both services, attendance figures for that day are inflated—by thirty-two. If they have three worship services, the inflation factor is sixty-four; and for four services, it's ninety-six!

There is a third fairly common cause of inaccurate counting. Since pastors are often ranked according to attendance figures, they have a bias for generosity when counting. When at a conference or convention, pastors are often asked, "How large is your church?" or as some put it, "How many are you worshiping these days?" One of the first questions search teams or call committees ask of any potential candidate is, "How large is your current church?" Pay raises tend to happen more frequently in churches where attendance is growing. All of this encourages pastors to speak "evangelastically" when citing attendance numbers.

A head usher who likes the pastor will allow generous attendance figures to stand. A head usher who really likes the pastor might even be compliant in the stretching of the figures, but woe to the pastor who falls from grace in the eyes of the head usher. Double counting ceases. New rules may appear such as, "If they aren't in their seat by five minutes after, they don't get counted." Actual counting may become less frequent, and estimates may become the norm. Of course these estimates tend to be significantly less than a hard count might produce and...