Honestly, I might seem like an improbable adviser to ministry leaders, but I care deeply for the church and its leaders. As a career executive, I have more than 40 years of experience at businesses such as Blockbuster Video, Angi’s, Boston Market, and Einstein’s Bagels. In the corporate world, I’ve experienced twists and turns, successes and failures. But I wouldn’t change a single thing, because God has faithfully ordered my steps. He has placed me on a most unlikely journey—and here I am, connecting with you.
About 15 years ago as my wife, Theresa, and I were serving various ministries and organizations in our personal time, we noticed that most ministry champions were overworked, disconnected from each other and under-resourced. So we co-founded Gloo, the technology platform that connects the faith ecosystem with scalable solutions. By serving more than 80,000 church leaders across America, we’ve learned important principles that can benefit you and your congregation. And, for us, we get up every day asking how we can unleash the collective might of the church for God’s mission and gospel impact.
In our work, we believe that three shifts in thinking will propel pastors and ministry leaders to more effective ministry and more impactful mission.
1. Measure What Matters With Common Frameworks.
In the mid-1800s, train tracks already existed from New York City to where I grew up in Chicago. The problem was that they did not have the same gauge—so you could go from Chicago to NYC on the railroad, but you had to keep changing trains because the tracks were not the same size. The lack of common standards led to great inefficiency until the Pacific Railroad Acts of 1863 created a common standard, resulting in an explosion of opportunity in the American West. You see, common frameworks unleash new opportunities.
As a church leader, you work hard, thinking about ways to help your people flourish and your organization thrive. Through our work with Barna, Harvard’s Global Flourishing Project, REVEAL, and others, we’ve learned how deeply pastors yearn to know whether their missional work is impacting lives. It’s their most consistent question.
Measuring organizational and personal health is difficult, though. It’s easier to track readily observable metrics such as baptisms, attendance, engagement, and volunteerism. And while those types of statistics are important, that’s not what usually keeps leaders up at night. Pastors are less worried about what people are doing than about how they’re doing.
Likewise for congregants, most people long to be seen and known. In fact, that’s essential to every individual’s journey toward flourishing. Being seen and known is beautiful and biblical. Throughout Scripture, we read about being known within the context of trusted relationships.
So, how can you begin to know your people more deeply? Couple your desire to know your people with questions that leverage common frameworks—that is, mutually accepted ways of measuring and communicating. Common frameworks provide a lingua franca—a shared language and clear way of seeing—so we can know what’s happening and serve people more effectively.
Imagine if doctors measured heart health in hundreds of ways. Think how challenging it would be for practitioners to discern patient health or risk—let alone what steps to take. Thankfully, the medical community did the hard work of pinpointing common frameworks such as body mass index, heart rate, cholesterol levels, and blood pressure. A common mission of better understanding overall health fueled the determination to measure in a common way.
Today tens of thousands of churches are doing the determined work of measuring what matters in their own ministries. By using the ChurchPulse assessment developed by Barna, Gloo, and the Harvard Global Human Flourishing Project, pastors are discovering how members are doing along seven key dimensions of flourishing: spiritual formation, relationships, purpose, finances, mental and physical health, contentment, and character.
Tapping into decades of research, Barna has taken the ChurchPulse framework even further. Researchers are uncovering common markers of what helps a faith community thrive. Respondents share views about how they as a church are doing in three key areas: nurturing their people, sending people into the community to serve, and equipping them to lead within the church.
Pastors such as Randy Frazee at Westside Family Church in Kansas City, Kansas—who writes in this very issue—make a regular yearly practice of leveraging these tools to grow their ministry impact.
