There is a ton of stuff going on in our church as we move into November. The Georgia Baptist Convention is right around the corner, our annual planning retreat, our annual business conference, not to mention the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays! Lots to do in our busy lives personally too with my son off at Truett McConnell University (doing fantastic too I might add!) while our daughter excels as a dual-enrolled high school junior. Our church is busy too preparing for the holiday season and the coming year.
Part of preparing is keeping up with what is happening now and what has happened in terms of numbers in the church. I hear it all the time: “I’m not a numbers person!” Sometimes someone will say something like, “I sure am glad you’re the numbers guy and not me.” The truth is I am a numbers guy and I love me a spreadsheet where I can track a lot of different, complex things and put together a simple report that helps us see what’s happening in our ministry. To do that, I track a lot of different metrics.
What do I count?
Well, I count the same things most other churches count. Things like the number of baptisms and the number of folks who have joined our church by transfer or statement of faith. In this current church year that ends at the end of this month we have had the joy of baptizing over 90 new followers of Jesus Christ. We’ve also welcomed a similar number into our congregation that have transferred their membership from another like-minded church or joined by statement of faith.
We keep up with how many people attend our worship services on Sunday morning, Sunday evening, and Wednesday night. Of course, we also count how many people are in our primary discipleship ministry, Sunday School. Over the course of the year, I calculate the average attendance for these activities and also the percentage of Sunday School attendance compared to Sunday morning worship. That’s a really good ratio to know!
Baptisms are a good indication of the effectiveness of the evangelism efforts of the church. The percentage of people in our primary discipleship ministry (for us around 70%) also helps us to better understand how well we are integrating the new people that God brings into our church. If new believers are going to be discipled, that’s the best place for that to happen.
Per Capita Giving
The attendance numbers are important because they are components of some of the other numbers I track and use to make other calculations. What might those be? Weekly budget giving and weekly total giving. By tracking weekly giving I am able to calculate the average weekly giving in my church and compare it to our weekly budget needs. I am also able to quickly calculate the per capita giving.
There are different ways to calculate this but the important thing is to be consistent in how you calculate it for it to be useful. I use the Sunday offering divided by total Sunday morning worship attendance (Sunday undesignated giving $ ¸ Sunday morning worship attendance = per capita giving).
This is probably a good place for me to note that this isn’t the kind of financial metric bankers will be looking for. If you’ve never worked on a commercial loan as a church leader you may not be aware of this term: giving unit. A giving unit is kind of a loose term that can mean a single person or a family of three or four (or more) people. A giving unit is simply a person or family that regularly contributes financially to the church. This is a great piece of information to have and is something I gather once a year.
How Many Sundays?
You’d probably be surprised to know I keep with how many Sundays are left in the year (as of the time I am writing this there are 9 Sundays remaining in 2019). Would you like to know why? I keep up with that because knowing the average weekly undesignated giving along with the average weekly Sunday morning worship attendance and how many Sundays are left in the year allows me to do a pretty good forecast. With a good forecast, we can anticipate where we are for the current budget year but we can also take a look at our giving trends as we prepare the budget for the coming year.
This is what these various metrics look like on my report. Hopefully seeing it will be helpful to some of you. Having this for a number of years is really, really helpful as you assess the effectiveness of your ministries. Before someone messages me saying, “numbers aren’t everything,” let me emphatically agree. Numbers are not everything when it comes to ministry, but the numbers are helpful and do indeed matter! The numbers tell part of the story of what is actually happening in our church and knowing them helps with planning, budgeting, evaluating, and more as we seek to serve our Lord Jesus Christ.
I could write a lot more about this kind of stuff, but I’d rather hear from readers. Is this helpful? Would you like me to expand on this or explain in more detail? Leave a comment and we’ll talk through it! Or maybe I’ll have enough to write another post.
Blessings,
Chris