In ministry ‘success criteria’ matter.
On the face of it that sounds like business speak, exactly the sort of thing I am critical of creeping into pastoral work.
Except I’m not sure that’s it. Practically speaking, to do something well you need to know how you are going to assess it afterwards. I’ve noticed in multiple churches that when we review things we review them against a whole range of unvoiced criteria. This can lead to significant mismatches in expectations, which can be awkward. Even at the basic level of your Sunday worship you need some sense of what good looks like in order to improve, change, or be happy with things as they are.
Again, practically speaking, it is much simpler to determine these before you do something. Doing so afterwards will make your internal sense of what did and didn’t go well shape your criteria. The thing that didn’t work will loom large in your mind even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual way we ‘assess’ whatever the event was.
For a Sunday, you can’t really discuss ‘before’ as we’re always in between Sundays, but divorcing the conversation about what ‘good’ looks like from a conversation about reviewing a given Sunday would be helpful. In my experience, church leaders tend to get obsessed by controllable things and things that go wrong. My suspicion is that if you wrote your success criteria for a generic Sunday meeting you would find that some of those things are uncontrollable and others are not the same things that go wrong.
Hopefully we would write theological criteria, because it’s not just about knowing what success is, but about knowing where you’re heading. In place of success criteria I could just as easily talk about telos and all of a sudden sound less business-speak and more intellectual pastor, because I used a Greek word. Something’s telos is its end, its goal, the thing that it is aimed towards. In James K. A. Smith’s thinking, the telos is the thing that is ultimately loved and worshipped. Our success criteria for anything we do are essentially what we ultimately are looking for from that thing. They are our desires.
What we intend—by which I mean what we desire—is what we achieve. Of course that isn’t entirely true all of the time, but it is what we will attempt to achieve. The converse is true too, what we achieve was what we intended, what we desired, 90% of the time. You get what you aim for.
The point here is threefold: first, it’s almost impossible to effectively review something if you don’t have something to review it against. That’s logical, but we manage to not set our standards up beforehand very often and instead just do things. It’s an easy trap to fall into; understandable, but unhelpful. We need to take a strategic step back and ask ‘why are we doing this?’ about everything that we do. We might occasionally stop something but mostly we’ll clarifying what we’re aiming at, what our desires are.
That’s helpful for the second and third points: second, when we write down what we’re aiming at we have the opportunity to look at it on a piece of paper or whiteboard and have the ‘oh no’ moment when we realise what we’ve written is profoundly stupid. Our desires often are. They may well not be what the Lord has commanded us to do in the church but the act of articulating that honestly is important, since we can then repent and course correct.
Third, and most vitally, you get what you aim for. By which I mean that when you’re clear about what you’re aiming for you will act in accordance with that aim. You won’t be overly concerned about the small things that didn’t go well if they have little to do with the overall aim, but you might be very concerned about a particular seemingly innocuous thing because it actually points in the opposite direction of the one you are intending towards.
The key task then is setting your goals, your telos, your ‘criteria,’ your intentions and desires for a given event. If it’s some thing the church is running, that’s easy enough, if it’s Sunday worship, that’s where it can be tricky.
The biggest temptation I can see is the temptation to ‘kitchen sink’ the job. We throw all the ideas onto a flipchart and then leave them there. Ideally you want to reduce your list to a manageable number so you can have a manageable set of review questions. You’re going to want to write this in team but that comes with the challenge of special interests and pet projects. You need clarity, not a long list of competing priorities. There will be good, even important, things you won’t include.
The second biggest temptation I can see is to approach it pragmatically. Before you’ve turned around twice Sundays are about visitors and car parking spaces and seat fill ratio, and you tack a missional explanation on the back of it.
Instead, theological questions, like ‘what is Sunday worship for?’, need to be approached theologically. You’ll need to write questions that are answerable at the end, but you start theologically. What is a Sunday for? You might answer that it’s for the purpose of seeing new people come in, explore the faith, and get saved. The car parking and seat fill might then flow from that, though your diagnostic questions will be at a higher level.
I, as regular readers will know, think differently about Sundays to that. Sundays are for the church to worship God. My diagnostic questions are going to start from that premise.
I’m in the process of thinking this through for my church at the moment, writing this has been about formulating my own thinking on a process (thanks for coming along for the ride), but I know the first diagnostic question we need to ask for certain. My team repeat it back to me often enough that it’s apparently something I ask a lot: did we hear the gospel?
That could sound missional, the missional guys would probably ask the question to. Ultimately though, I’m approaching that differently; I believe preaching is an offer of Jesus to Christians because Christians need to hear the gospel as a balm to the soul week-by-week. Our worship starts and ends in Christ incarnate, crucified, raised, ascended, and giving the Spirit. Jesus is the beginning and end of Christian worship, so the gospel—the story of his deeds that allow us to know him, recorded in the Old and New Testament—is the heart of what we have to communicate.
That won’t be my only question. ‘Did we worship God?’ is probably too broad to be useful as it clearly depends on our hearts, so we’re looking for questions that get to the core of what it means for Sunday to bring us to worship the Lord. I’ve got some others brewing.
Ultimately, we won’t all have exactly the same ones, but the act of formulating them will keep us clear on why we do what we do and help us to focus on the main things. Ephemera are ever in the air in churches; ignoring them requires a framework. Focus requires a framework, so if we want to focus we need to construct a framework. Our frameworks need to grow from our theological first principles.
Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash
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