WARNING – IT IS LIKELY THE CONTENT OF THIS POST WILL BE OFFENSIVE TO SOME – YOU HAVE BEEN APPROPRIATELY WARNED
My daily business is filled with acronyms. One of the popular ones over the last 18-24 months has been “KPI’s,” or “Key Performance Indicators.” Translation – these are indicators (we have sometimes called milestones) that we will review on an ongoing basis to see if the ship is headed the right direction. So, in effect, when we do a project, we determine up-front what those items will be that let us know if we are being successful. If we find we are not successful, we change. It could mean changing people, changing approach, changing method, or completely restructuring what we do.
My church heritage is not accustomed to using KPI’s. If we were, we would have dumped notions like Vacation Bible School (VBS) long ago.
We have all heard the old elder joke…”how many elders does it take do change a light bulb?” response: “did you say change?” This mindset is not necessarily limited to Elders, though. In fact, I have seen cases where Elderships have fought against the tide (to their credit) to make things happen differently simply because what was going on was not working.
My heritage (dare I say it?) has a rather pathetic history when it comes to the teaching principle of monitoring and adjusting. We tend to think that a new coat of paint really does make it all better. A snack upgrade at VBS (home-baked rather than store-bought lemon jumble cookies) will roll in the masses. Attendance declining? Better trot-out the sermons on instrumental music and baptism. That’ll pack those pews. Lack of congregational focus? Gospel Meeting time!
Let’s develop the idea of Vacation Bible School for just a second. I’m sure it had its heyday – primarily when I was growing up in the ’70’s. Since then, VBS hasn’t changed much. Oh, we have put massive dollars into it in a lot of places, changed the format and experimented with multi-day vs. one long day. We have done all we can to bring in the kids…but when it is all said and done, the results puzzle me. What we usually get are a lot of burned-out volunteers and a few visitors that do not return. In fact, many times those visitors were visiting relatives of members. Was this the original intent? Is there something inherently wrong with VBS? Of course not. I just want to call it what it is – a relic. Something that we do mainly because we do not have the guts to kill it because it is not working.
What are the KPI’s for VBS? If it is to keep something from dying because “we loved it when we were kids” and “we do it for the kids,” then we need to claim success. If it is an evangelism tool, then I would submit it needs a bit of re-tooling.
How about other things we do? Yes, most change in a religious context is met with speculation. Even in bible times, change was suspect. Let me be clear – there are many items we can and should adjust, all of which can be done without changing any kind of biblical principle. It becomes difficult, though, when the mindset is such that mediocrity is called success.
As I write this, I am in my hotel room in Times Square. I spend a fair amount of time in NYC – enough to know that we are out of touch with much of society at large. Many of our programs designed to get people to our church buildings just don’t resonate with today’s post-modernism. Maybe one of the core changes we need to consider is a way to get Christians pulling people together outside of our buildings, or consider doing more with the centralized spots we have.
I have witnessed several of our congregations doing things with their buildings that simply would not have been tolerated in years past – sponsoring health clubs for example, or even opening restaurants. I am actually seeing this work and bring in people that have no affiliation with a church. This is, however, a pretty radical departure from the standard four-hour use of many of our facilities.
Another in-building program may not be the answer, though. Maybe “going deep” biblical-principled discussions on a Wednesday night at Starbucks would be a better use of a Christian’s time than yet another Wednesday night class.
While I’m not a huge fan of his, I do like one of Machiavelli’s quotes because I think it hits many of those who are part of the religious movement I am part of between the eyes:
“And one should bear in mind that there is nothing more difficult to execute, nor more dubious of success, nor more dangerous to administer than to introduce a new order to things; for he who introduces it has all those who profit from the old order as his enemies; and he has only lukewarm allies in all those who might profit from the new. This lukewarmness partly stems from fear of their adversaries, who have the law on their side, and partly from the skepticism of men, who do not truly believe in new things unless they have personal experience in them.”
-Machiavelli – The Prince, 1513
It is OK to evaluate our programs, or our “KI’s” (Key Initiatives). Outside of communion, there is very little we do that was part of the early church anyway. That church grew from viral relationships with unbelievers. Do our programs / ministries / outreach actually create that same type of viral network?
-MH
