If you truly love baseball, you love statistics. The Sabermetrics, the records and the battle for the Triple Crown. There is something about knowing how often a player gets on base in a rainy day in June that gets the baseball mind rolling.
Are you measuring your youth ministry? It might seem like a silly question; however, it’s imperative to your growth. If you do not know how to measure your youth ministry, you will not know its productivity or health. To know your ministry’s health, you should look at:
• Attendance: While the size of your attendance isn’t the only sign of health, it’s an important one. It will tell you whether or not you are growing. It will tell you what seasons are challenging for teens to come. It will let you know what people are excited about.
• Participation: When you are measuring participation, you are seeing the tangible ways teens are growing in your ministry. You might measure how many teens bring a Bible, get involved in ministry or show up to an event. You could look at engagement in a song during worship. To set up this measurement scale, you need to know what are “next steps” in your ministry.
• Social Impact: You need to know what type of impact you are having on the lives of teens during the week. While you can have people tell you anecdotally, you can also measure through social media. Are teens sharing with their friends that they are heading to church? Do they reflect on the night after leaving? To help you measure your social impact, give teens hashtags that refer to the ministry.
• New Growth: You need to know who is new to your ministry and what brought them there. This will help with your evangelization efforts. It might mean giving students a comment card to fill out when they arrive or just asking and making note of it later. Know how you are growing, so that you can fuel and fund it.
The one danger with just leaving everything to statistics is they won’t always tell you LIFE CHANGE (looking at wins). To measure that means just capturing stories. The more you capture, the more you’ll see how God is moving.
In the end, do not be afraid to measure your ministry. You need to see how you are moving, and what needs to be addressed. The more conscientious you are of your efforts, the stronger your ministry will be.
How do you measure your youth ministry?
