How do you measure how you’re doing in ministry? For most, I guess it’s “I don’t.” It’s easy as a sysadmin to know how well you’re doing. Just track how long your servers have stayed up or the number of outages or how many “nines” of uptime you have for the year. For that matter, your customers are a good gauge of success there. Are the users able to use the servers? Simple.
I know church isn’t about numbers, but it’s good to track certain things. I tend to think that when the numbers dwindle, it’s because you’re preaching the truth and nobody wants to hear it. When your numbers are growing, it’s probably because you’re tickling somebody’s ears and not doing any good exposition. I’d like to have a lot of youth in our church as much as the next youth pastor, but I’d rather have three committed to Christ, than 30 sitting on the fence.
So for youth ministry, I guess I could track attendance, baptisms, and decisions like a good little Baptist. I wish there were a way to anonymously track whether or not youth were having daily quiet times, if they shared Jesus with their friends on a weekly basis, memorized any Bible verses, or helped edify a Christian brother or sister and sanctify them. Those are the metrics I’d like to see. Then I’d know if I were doing a good job.
So, “to track or not to track…” that is the question.
Or is “What do I track” a better question?
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