josh whitehead

Often I am asked by other churches what numbers we evaluate to look at the health of our ministry. Here you go:

• Number of people accepting Christ and being baptized. Last year we baptized 246 people – we’re on pace to see the same or more this year.
• Number of new people serving in ministry. Our goal for the year is to have 400 new people serving in ministry (were about half way there).
• Number of children & adults on the weekends (Pellissippi campus & iCampus). We take accurate counts of each worship service for both children and adults.
• Number attending small group each week, once per month and the number of total groups and new groups. We desire to have 50%+ of our weekend adult worship attendance in home small groups (we don’t muddy the water with kids – they are obviously in groups on campus).
• Number of middle and high school students attending each week. We look at worship and small group numbers for each.
• Total weekend offerings and average amount given by each adult in attendance (for a particular weekend & for the year).
• Membership Process. How many people are completing the classes to learn about FPC, find a small group & get connected to a ministry. Of that number, we evaluate how many of those people are sticking. We do this with FellowshipOne – a GREAT ministry tool for evaluating metrics.

Just to clarify, numbers to us are people whose lives are being changed. Sometimes I wish we could list them by name, but that’s not possible. Amazing people make up the ministry of FPC!

Outside of each of these, we also look at some of the more difficult things to evaluate. In January, we measured spiritual growth in groups through surveying as many people as possible. Also, we encourage and evaluate life on life mentoring, and we value the freedom people experience from Celebrate Recovery and other programs.

What are some of the things that you look at that we have missed?