As obvious as it may sound, this was not how scouting had been done. Scouts largely recruited and drafted players by their general, overall feel about a player. But Brand wanted his scouts to forget how good players looked, how big they were, or even how fast they ran. The only stat and measurement that mattered was whether a player could cross home plate or help other teammates do so.
Billy Beane and Peter Brand changed the game of baseball forever, as the Oakland A’s went on to have the longest winning streak in American League baseball history.
Church leaders are somewhat like those old-time baseball scouts. We have lots of impressions and stats about all kinds of things, mostly good things. I interviewed dozens of church leaders, and here are just some of what churches count.
• The number of people who attend a worship service
• The number of people who are in a small group
• The number of people who are serving both within the church and outside the church
• The number of people who are going through an apprenticeship
• The number of leadership residents, or people being trained to plant new churches or campuses
• The number of people who are in a small group that have a written mission statement and are commissioned
• The number of new churches or campuses started
• The number of people in new churches and campuses that the church started
• The number of first-time givers to the church
• The amount of money given to the church
• The amount of money given to organizations outside the church
• The number of other churches or nonprofits with whom you partner
• The number of missional communities
• The number of applications received for microgrants to fund community service projects
• The number of baptisms in a year
• The number of people who became a part of the church through personal invitation or connection
• The number of people who are customers of your café
• The number of people you send out from your church to other parts of the world as kingdom leaders
• The amount of resources you give away to invest in global engagement
• The number of relationships your congregation has with people who are unchurched
• The frequency with which your people connect with others in “third places” in their communities
• The number of volunteer hours you invest in the community
• The number of people who have completed a life plan and are pursuing it
• The number of invitations to events and outings received from non‐Christians
• The number of new relationships formed in which people know each other’s names
• The number of community‐based initiatives your people are supporting with their time and money
• The number of leaders you are developing
• The number of Bibles purchased and given away
• The number of people who share their spiritual story
• The number of groups that are reproducing
• The number of people who are in small groups
• The percentage of people in a small group or missional community
• The percentage of people who are serving in a ministry or in the community
• The percentage of leaders who have an apprentice
• The number of people in intentional discipleship relationships
• A decrease in crime in a community
• A decrease in the number of children living under the poverty level
• The percentage increase in home ownership in a community
• The percentage increase of students graduating from high school
• The decrease in the percentage of marriages ending in divorce
• The number of people who have led or engaged in cross‐cultural trips
• The number of significant legislative or policy changes influenced
• The number of people in recovery
• The number of children adopted by members of the church
• A decrease in the number of children waiting to be adopted in your city
• The number of children sponsored
• Dollars spent per person being discipled
• Dollars spent per person baptized
• The number of life-change stories that can be shared with the church
• The percentage of the budget given to causes outside the church
• The percentage of people with a self-identified mission
• The number of conversions
• The number of new and consistent givers
• The number of people who read through the Bible in a year
• The number of people who completed a Bible reading plan
In all our counting, I believe we have missed what matters most: Is the kingdom of God advancing? Kingdom building is the church’s equivalent of baseball’s runs.
My friend Dave Travis, a thought leader regarding the future of the church, made a very helpful observation about the church and keeping score: “Churches have to be careful not to confuse the scorecard with the scoreboard,” he said. “The scorecard offers you lots of important and interesting stats that you can track, but the scoreboard tells you whether you are winning or losing the game.”
So what should we count? And how do we keep track of kingdom building? Great question! Keep reading; I’m going to give you a simple scoreboard for hero-making churches and a simple tool for hero makers.
Simple Scoreboard for Hero-Making Churches
At Community Christian Church, we agree that you need to count the number of people who are attending, and we also keep track of dollars and cents. But we don’t quit there. We prioritize two other measurements that lead to kingdom building: disciple making and movement making.
Let me explain these two ways of fueling and measuring growth in the kingdom of God.
1. MEASURE DISCIPLE MAKING
Are we making disciples? Isn’t that what the Great Commission is all about? For the church, this is how we score runs. If we do this, we win. If we don’t, we lose—even if our other metrics are great.
That question, “Are we making disciples?” isn’t as easy as it appears, because it means I must first offer a definition: what is a disciple of Jesus? Besides all the good teaching in Scripture, volumes have been written on it.
The biggest mistake you can make as a leader is to ignore that definition. If you can’t answer the question, “What is a disciple of Jesus?” you’ll never know if your church is winning.
If you can’t answer the question, “What is a disciple of Jesus?” you’ll never know if your church is winning.
After answering the question, the next step is to boil down the definition to a few key measurements. You won’t be able to measure every nuance of what it means to be a disciple, so don’t try. Instead select a few of the key attributes and make those what you measure.
It was several years ago at Community Christian Church that we set out to create our very first scoreboard. After prayer, thoughtful study, and conversation, we concluded that a disciple is someone who is apprenticing with Jesus. We like the term apprentice because it implies a relational way of learning that includes both knowing and doing. Too often churches have made the mistake of equating discipleship with taking a series of classes or only gaining cognitive knowledge.
With that understanding of discipleship, we began to get more precise about a simple and measurable definition of an apprentice of Jesus. We determined that the simplest way of describing a disciple was to consider three primary, growing relationships. We call them the three 3Cs, and we find them throughout Scripture. One passage that embodies all three is the first description of the early church’s activities, in Acts 2:42–47: “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. . . .
They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people.”
We see those early apprentices of Jesus experiencing three primary relationships: celebrating, connecting, and contributing. (See Figure 9.2.)
FIGURE 9.2
When a Christ follower is celebrating, connecting, and contributing, we call them 3C. On a monthly basis, I get an update on our dashboard of how many 3C Christ followers we have and how that number has grown from the month and year before. I will be the first to admit that the 3Cs do not cover every aspect of what it means to apprentice with Jesus, but it is our simple and measurable response to the question, “What is a disciple?”
2. MEASURE MOVEMENT MAKING
When we first sat down as a group of friends from college and dreamed about what Community Christian Church could become, we scratched out the following three-phase dream on the back of a restaurant napkin.
Phase 1: Impact church
Phase 2: Reproducing church
Phase 3: Movement of reproducing churches
The most recent addition to Community’s scoreboard is a metric to help us determine whether we are winning in our efforts toward phase 3 of our dream, to catalyze a movement of reproducing churches.
To measure movement making, again, you must first define it. As challenging as it is to define a disciple, defining a movement is even tougher. One of the best definitions I’ve seen comes from the research of Ed Stetzer and Warren Bird. In Viral Church, they define a church-planting movement as “a rapid multiplication of churches where a movement grows through multiplication by 50% in the number of churches in a given year to the third generation. For example, if they are 100 one year, they are at least 150 the next, and that growth is accounted for mostly by new converts, not transfers. Finally, this kind of growth continues to the third generation.” While that is a very helpful definition to a network or denomination, I think a local church needs a simpler metric. We keep track of our movement-making efforts using the following three simple measurements.
1. Apprentice leaders. Apprentice leaders are people in training to lead small groups and ministry teams. These are entry-level leaders who oversee groups and teams of approximately four to twenty people. It is leaders who ensure that disciple making is happening, and these apprentice leaders ensure that there are more and more people who will take the lead in making sure the movement is moving. At the core of every kind of movement is apprenticeship.
2. Leadership residents. Leadership residents are church planters in training. A residency lasts from six to twelve months. This high-level apprenticeship is the key mechanism for movement making. In an effort to catalyze a movement of reproducing churches, we challenge each of our campus pastors to have one leadership resident per year. An important movement-making measurement is our number of apprentice church planters, or leadership residents.
3. Family tree. The family tree is your church’s weekly attendance plus the weekly attendance of all the churches you have planted. This metric was inspired by my mentor and friend Bob Buford. I’ve heard him say a hundred times, “My fruit grows on other people’s trees.” That is the hero maker’s mindset, and that is what it takes if you want to see a movement. To plant new trees, which in this case is starting new churches, requires sending leaders, people, and resources. We wanted our scoreboard to reward and not penalize our campuses for sending money and people to start new campuses and new churches, so we came up with the metric called family tree. We are discovering that an important movement-making measurement is to determine how many people are part of each family tree.
Does counting apprentice leaders, leadership residents, and the church attendance of our family tree ensure we will catalyze a movement of reproducing churches? I have a strong conviction that it will, but only time will tell. However, I do know this for sure: now that we are keeping score of these three movement-making metrics, we have a greater opportunity to see it happen than we did when we were not! So go ahead and ask the question, “What does it take to catalyze a movement?” Answer the question in a way that is simple and measurable, and add it to your scoreboard. If we want to see the mission of Jesus accomplished, it will come through a movement of multiplying churches.
My fruit grows on other people’s trees.
—BOB BUFORD
I’m Playing to Win
My conviction about playing to win when it comes to the kingdom of God continues to grow. For the past several years, I’ve had the opportunity to provide leadership for Exponential as the president of the conference and chairman of the board. As I mentioned in the introduction to this book, I work alongside Todd Wilson, full-time director and CEO of Exponential, the mastermind who has taken this once-small church-planting conference and grown it to become the largest church-planting conference in the world (that we know of). The growth has been a tremendous grace from God and simply amazing.
It was after the Exponential East conference sold out for the first time that the question came to me: “How do we know whether the Exponential conference is really winning?” My first reaction was, “We just sold out and had tens of thousands of people joining us via webcast!” I continued to think, “It is the largest church-planting conference anywhere!” Then I told myself, “We are able to offer registrations to church planters at a very low price and still break even!” I concluded, “If we have more people attending than ever, and we have a model that is financially self-sustaining, we must be winning!”
That’s when it hit me: “Dave, you are only measuring nickels and noses. How do you know whether Exponential is mentoring and deploying new church planters? How do you know whether Exponential is accomplishing its mission? How do you know that this conference is being used to accelerate movements?” I immediately sought out Todd. I said, “Todd, remember that conversation we had on the airplane when you challenged me to start measuring the things that I say really matter?”
He said, “Sure, I remember.”
I had him right where I wanted him. “Todd, this time I want to challenge you. We say that what really matters to Exponential is mentoring church planters and advancing the mission of Jesus by accelerating movements, but right now we are only measuring butts and bucks. We need a new way of keeping score. How do we really know we are winning?”
Todd smiled and nodded his head in total agreement.
It was this conversation that led Todd and me to our four-to-ten mission. We refused to settle for a derrieres-and-dollars metric. Realizing that only 4% of all churches in the United States ever reproduce, we determined to put all our efforts and energy into moving the needle to 6%, then 8%, and ultimately 10%. That is our big dream. And the scoreboard of the Exponential conference is primarily measuring not how many people show up or how many people pay admission but how many churches are Level 4 and 5 churches! Why? Because a scoreboard will tell us whether we are winning; the scoreboard never lies.
Kingdom Builder Profile from India
I’ve told you what I do at Community Christian Church and at Exponential, but let me give you examples from other contexts. For instance, if any country of the world gives Christians a good excuse to hunker down, circle the wagons, and look out for their own, it’s India. Mob violence and other persecution readily tempt Christ followers there to live in fear and to focus on watching your own back. At present, Christianity in all its forms is officially less than 3% of the population and, sadly, is an unpopular minority. Various government documents describe Christians as enemies of the nation, “and the phrase is common in the public discourse in social media,” summarizes Vijayesh Lal, executive director of Evangelical Fellowship of India, in his annual report on hatred and targeted violence against Christians in that country.45
On my most recent trip to India, I spoke with Vijayesh. I expressed my concern, asking what we can do. He responded, “Don’t pray that the persecution stops, because it is advancing the mission of Jesus! Instead pray that we will have t
he courage to withstand it.”
That was one of the most courageous statements I have ever heard.
Vijayesh is not alone. One of the brightest lights in India, illuminating that country with the good news about Jesus, is his friend and mine Dr. Ajai Lall, pastor and missions pioneer, currently serving as director of Central India Christian Mission. In a coincidence of history, the home in which he was raised is the same house which earlier had been the home of global missions leader Donald McGavran, author of Bridges of God. As you hear Ajai’s story, notice how his focus remains on being a kingdom builder.
Ajai Lall
CENTRAL INDIA CHRISTIAN MISSION
MADHYA PRADESH, INDIA
His “extremist” faith has seen twenty-five hundred churches planted—with five hundred thousand believers—in one generation.
My country of India is full of extremists: Hindu, Islamic, Maoist, and more. I have friends who were beaten or raped simply because they claim the name of Christ. Some of our church planters have been persecuted or even tortured in horrifying ways. I’ve been in a big city going to an appointment when a terrorist explosion was so close that the police made me turn around. My family has been attacked by several gunmen. Even Christian acts of kindness are being rejected, such as ending the decades-long child sponsorship programs by Compassion across India, closing 589 centers that were serving 145,000 children, funded by $45 million in annual donations.46
I believe that Jesus wants each of his followers to be Christian extremists, but of a different type. Not one who uses explosions or violence, but someone who shows an extreme love and compassion to enemies and prays for those who persecute us. If I don’t have a heart of forgiveness, I am lost.
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