Measuring Church

One of my friends made a claim recently that one can't measure how well a Church is doing.

Bunk.

In fairness, what he was really saying was that there is no true 'bottom line' in a Church setting. One can measure how much money is in the bank, but unlike a private business, profit does not really reflect the mission of the Church. But of course no one running a business would be foolish enough to focus on only the bottom line to measure their success either. All organizations need multiple dimensions, both financial and otherwise to assess the success of their efforts.

One measurement tool that I used extensively in my strategic consulting/reengineering career was the concept of "Touches, Handshakes and Hugs". The concept is simple: organizations can measure how effective their programs are in part, by how many times their publics interact with them and the intensity of those interactions. First some definitions:

A "Touch" is a simple interaction - a parent dropping a child off at school is 'touching' the school.

A "Handshake" is an interaction where the substance of the Church's message is communicated. The child's day at the church school would constitute a "handshake".

If the Child or the Parent accept Christ, Join the Church or otherwise make a serious commitment to the Kingdom, then the handshake turns into a 'hug'.

This "Touch-Shake-Hug" or TSH measurement can be a useful tool to a Church. For example, it can be used to identify opportunities to communicate the church's missional message to the public: where do we have lots of touches? How can we turn some of them into handshakes? For example a church school can email short videos explaining to the parent what the kids are being taught in bible - giving the parents the same message. Or a mom's day out program can use the touch opportunities afforded it to invite parents to other events.

It's also a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of various programs: how many unchurched touches does a particular program achieve? How well does it turn 'touches' into 'handshakes'? and how often do those 'shakes' turn into commitments to God or the Church, or 'hugs'? If a program isn't getting the touches, then it won't get the shakes or the hugs. If it's getting lots of touches but we can't track it to shakes or hugs, perhaps we need to rethink our approach or investment.

TSH also provides a useful metric for evaluating competing investment opportunities, whether they be capital or ministry opportunities, here or abroad. All investments should be required to project their Touch and Handshake metrics. We wouldn't require them to project 'Hug' metrics, instead we rely on the Holy Spirit to turn faithful attempts to touch people's lives and to share with them into commitments or hugs. Obviously we should invest in those initiatives that are likely to touch the most people the deepest. The TSH method gives us a language to quantify and measure that.

TSH isn't some brilliant new idea, indeed we measure certain types of handshakes (attendance, enrollment) and certain types of hugs (conversions, membership) today. What TSH does is put our scattered human interaction measurements into a broader framework that allows us to think and plan strategically about where we need to improve and where we should invest.

Just another tool in pursuit of the kingdom.