Is Your Witness Working? How Does God Measure Effectiveness?

Are there measurable outcomes as you live out your faith and share it with others? How does God measure effective lives and ministries?

In your job, you likely have certain expectations that your company expects you to meet. If you work on an assembly line, your employer measures your performance based on how many units you can generate per hour. If you are a medical professional, your evaluation may be based on how many patients you see and their health outcomes. But how does a church measure the effectiveness of its staff? Further, how do Christians measure the effectiveness of their witness?

Measurable Outcomes

As a behavioral health specialist, I know that my organization must report to its funders to prove the effectiveness of our programs. Some of our contract deliverables include how often we see our clients, which identified goals they complete, whether they regularly engage with service providers, and the like. If I am to know my work is effective, there must be measurable outcomes.

Mutual Accountability

When I was a pastor, I regularly completed multiple forms of reporting. Of course, many pastors mask their laziness by insisting on complete confidentiality. Not wanting to be accountable to their churches for the work they do, defensive ministers state that if their churches expect performance reporting, then the congregation obviously doesn’t trust them, and that’s a bigger problem. If your church’s minister balks at your request for reporting, there certainly are bigger problems, but they are on the part of the pastor, not the church.

Everyone is responsible for ensuring they are effectively doing their jobs, and clergy members are no exception. Similarly, if your church has elders or deacons, then they should report to the pastor based on their activity within their roles. Mutual answerability keeps everyone accountable.

Ministry Reporting

When I was in ministry, I had to submit multiple kinds of documentation to show that I was doing the work for which the church called me.

First, I delivered a monthly report to my deacons, reviewing my work activities. While I always kept the names of the people who received pastoral visits confidential, I reported the number of pastoral visits I made each month. I did not report the nature of those conversations, but simply the number. I reviewed the total of sermons preached, Bible studies taught, weddings or funerals conducted, and baptisms performed. When pastoral visits took me to the hospital, nursing home, or a place of incarceration, I recorded those as subcategories.
Second, I submitted a monthly mileage report. This worked as a confirmation of the visits I reported.
Third, I used these reports to fill out an annual account for our denomination. In addition to the church’s Sunday morning worship attendance, the denomination wanted to know the activities of organizations within our church. We reported Sunday school attendance, choir membership, the activities of missions organizations within the church, youth group attendance, and other relevant statistics.
Fourth, I delivered an annual state-of-the-church address at a regular church business meeting, evaluating the church’s condition, progress, and plans for the next year.

Together, these data helped us evaluate the success of our staff and ministries. Just as people must consider their effectiveness at work, they should reflect on their conscientiousness as Christians.

Numbers Matter

Some pastors and churches like to say that numbers don’t matter, but Jesus would disagree. When Jesus fed the multitudes, somebody took the time to count the exact amount of food he started with, and the specific thousands of people he fed.

Likewise, in the Parable of the Sower, Jesus said a farmer went out to sow his seed. Some fell on a path, some on rocky soil, and some on thorny ground. Each struggled to grow because of the farmer’s poor planting. However, “Other seed fell into good soil and brought forth grain, growing up and increasing and yielding thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.” The only way to know a statistic like that is if you first count the seed and then count the harvest. Without numbers, you can’t tell the effectiveness of work.

Unfortunately, many guilt-inspiring, performance-based pastors use statistics abusively. They quote numbers of “souls saved” to boost their egos. Or they impose quotas of doors their missions teams must knock on if they want to please God. While numbers were important to Jesus, he never used them to compare one disciple to another, or to berate them for not measuring up. If your church leadership uses statistics in this way, this is spiritual abuse, and you should consider your exit strategy.

The Power of Stories

Another way to demonstrate your effectiveness is through the power of stories. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Similarly, a word picture is worth a thousand charts, graphs, and tables. My agency’s funders want to see numeric outcomes demonstrating the effectiveness of their contributions. But they also want to hear testimonials from our clients who graduate from the program. Though we change the names to protect confidentiality, these stories provide powerful indicators of lives changed.

This was the purpose of the gospels. Through the power of storytelling, each gospel writer bears witness to the life-changing ministry of Jesus. Luke even begins his gospel by stating that he is creating a “well-ordered account” of Jesus’s ministry. Perhaps Luke’s recipient, the most excellent Theophilus, wanted to evaluate the effectiveness of this new sect of Christians. So too, the Church often invites members to speak before the congregation, giving testimonies of the way Jesus or the church changed their lives. They say that numbers do not lie, but I maintain that powerful stories tell an even better truth.

The Only Evaluation That Matters

Of course, in the end, the only performance evaluation that matters is what God thinks about how we lived our lives. The good news is that, contrary to the expectations of high-control, high-demand religion, God, who sits on the throne, does not judge using a tally sheet. Your employer may do so, but God does not.

Divine judgment is not based upon your performance output. Otherwise, the thief on the cross would have no chance. Instead, God judges based on your changed heart and the kind of person you have become. Without keeping score, God wonders if you are the sort who feeds the poor, clothes the naked, gives hope to the oppressed, and visits those in prison and hospitals? Or, are you the type of Christian who denies justice to the oppressed, ignores the pleas of the downtrodden, and actively persecutes the marginalized? Ultimately, without a single tally sheet being used, the only evaluation that matters is whether or not you loved. Thankfully, God judges based not on your data, but on your story.