Benchmarking – Why We Do things the Way We Do

To date, our team at Holy Cow! Consulting has worked with close to 3,000 congregations. We have worked with congregations in every U.S. state with the exception of Hawaii (unfortunately for us). We have been stuck in snow storms in Minnesota, lost in the woods in Wisconsin, seen Mount Rainer in the rearview mirror, found out how cool Omaha is, hung out with a seal in San Diego, forgotten to order unsweetened iced tea in South Carolina, and been gently heckled by congregations in Michigan because we have a lot of OSU allegiance in our office. We have covered a lot of ground over the years and have met a lot of amazing people.

If we are running a Congregation Assessment Tool (CAT) within our current database, the data is benchmarked against around 1,800 congregations – this number grows every day. Approximately 88% of those congregations within our current benchmarking have run their CAT in the last five years.

Just as overview, when we look at the database this is a general overview of its makeup:

411 congregations are Evangelical Church in America (ELCA)
412 congregations are Episcopal
375 congregations are Presbyterian
68 congregations are Methodist
80 congregations are United Church of Christ
25 congregations are Nondenominational
24 congregations are Lutheran Church Missouri Synod
The remaining numbers include congregations that are Baptist, African Methodist Episcopal, ECO, LCMC, and various other mainstream denominations

So why do we benchmark? Benchmarking allows us to take the data from each congregation and remove the element of guesswork. For example, when we look at hospitality within a congregation, one of the questions we ask people is whether “a friendly atmosphere prevails among the members of our church.” If 61% of the congregation clearly agree with that statement, just looking at the raw data, that appears to be pretty good level of hospitality. That is more than half of the people within the congregation saying that there is a friendly atmosphere. But when we compare the data within the benchmarking, we find that this only puts the responses to that question in the 12th percentile. So, 87% of the other congregations in the database had more people clearly agree with that statement. This significantly changes what we understand from the data. We are able to move from trying to guess “is this how it is supposed to feel” and we can see what is typical and what is exceptional about each congregation.

When we talk about benchmarking, one of the most frequent questions we get asked is ”why don’t you benchmark us against other churches in our denomination.” The denomination question is usually followed by a general statement about who they are as Lutherans, Presbyterians, Episcopalians, etc. Notably, here and there, the data can show some national denominational tendencies which we have noted in our denominational books. But generally, those statements about who each denomination claims to be has yet to play out meaningfully congregation to congregation in the data.

For example, if you look at the maps on the left, they include all of the ELCA congregations in our database. You can see that they range anywhere from very low energy and satisfaction to very high energy and satisfaction. Likewise, these ELCA congregations are conservative and progressive, flexible and settled.

When we receive an order for the CAT from an ELCA church we cannot predict where that congregation will land in any one area. Instead, the data tells us that each ELCA church could land anywhere in the benchmarking – and this is important.

But there is an even more important reason why we benchmark the way we do. Both the Pew Research Center and the Cooperative Congregational Election Study (CCES) looked at mainstream denominations over a four-year period. The Pew’s study ended in 2016 and CCES ended their four-year study in 2015. What they both found is that within that four-year period 16% of members in mainstream denominations changed denominational affiliations. Methodists become Episcopalians, Presbyterians became Methodists, Lutherans in the ELCA moved to the LCMS.

What does this mean? Let’s break this down by year and attendance. 16% over four years, is 4% per year. This means that if a congregation has a weekly attendance of 150 people, there is the potential that the congregation will lose 6 people per year. By the end of four years, it is estimated that 24 people in that congregation will move to another denomination.

This type of movement indicates that benchmarking churches within their own denomination is not how the average member is looking at their experience within their congregation. The average Presbyterian member is not looking at their experience and asking, “is this how I have felt in other Presbyterian churches?” they are instead asking “is this how I have felt in other churches” but also “is there a better place I fit regardless of denomination?” As we posited in “Fly in the Ointment” several years ago, people no longer just buy Ford cars in allegiance to the Ford company. The same is true within our denominational life. People will find the church that fits them and what they need in their life, regardless of the denominational name on the sign out in the front yard.

It is our mission at Holy Cow! Consulting to help regional associations and congregations, through an evidence-based discernment process, become vital, healthy organizations that better serve Christ and our communities. We benchmark the way we do because the data shows that putting congregations in a greater context is essential to truly assess where they currently are in order to help move them to where they are called to be. This is not just our mission, it is also our ministry.

We hope to see you in our travels.

– Emily Swanson, President

Moving Past the Same Old Plan – How OI can help

As the team at Holy Cow! Consulting works with congregations all over the country, we find ourselves experiencing two things quite frequently.

The first is the limitation of count data and the same old responses to that data. You don’t have to do a lot of research to find that a large number of mainstream denominations are experiencing decline in worship attendance, as well as a decline in membership numbers. Often the response from regional associations to this decline is that congregations can mitigate these losses by (1) sharing the good news of Jesus Christ and (2) connecting with the growing number of the spiritual but not-religious unchurched people in their communities.

Here we see the limitations of count data. At a national level, denominations know virtually nothing about the kinds of experiences members and visitors are having in their churches. They have no choice but to continue citing the same statistics with the same proposed solutions.

But in fact, churches do not benefit from a pep talk urging them to reach out. Reaching new members and incorporating them into the life of the church is already the first or second priority of 99% of the denominational churches in the USA. The real problem that needs to be addressed can only be discovered through witness data, the power of letting members and visitors speak.

When we listen, we discover the real issues: in the typical church, only half of the members are clearly satisfied and more than a third (37%) feel members are simply “going through the motions.” Until this changes, it will be impossible to make the case that the church is a better option for their lives than the local library, which performs many of the same functions of the church and with a 90% satisfaction level. There are exceptional churches that rise about these generalizations which we call transformational churches. However, our focus on count data means we are neither identifying them nor learning from them fast enough. This also indicates that our congregations are not adapting.

The second experience is a call from an interim pastor who has stepped into a church where the previous pastor left in a state of frustration. In this all too frequent situation, when we run the Congregation Assessment Tool (CAT) and look at the Vital Signs report of the results, it shows a church in the hospice quadrant. This means that unless the church makes changes in the system to achieve a higher level of missional flexibility, the next pastor will also fail, and the next, and the next. This is not the case of finding the leader that fits in the congregational culture but rather a situation where the congregation must decide it is time to change. Without this congregational self-awareness, we are sentencing leaders to failure.

These hospice congregations have made reaching new people their highest priority (as urged by their denomination), but they are a congregation where only 30% of the members feel positive about the church and over 50% of members feel the congregation is just going through the motions. This is not the setting where new people will feel the energy and vibrance of what Christ can bring to their lives within the body of a congregation. Outreach by this church is not only futile; it is likely poisonous.

The way to move past this same old plan that is failing our congregations is organizational intelligence. The enlightenment from Organizational Intelligence (OI) offers meaningful hope for breaking out of the tired clichés and sermonic urgings. OI helps identify practical strategies that hold real promise. It presses congregations to look deeper than count data- helping them take a meaningful look at where they are today, not where they wish they were, but where they truly are in terms of organizational health. And folded into next steps, OI can help move congregations to where they are called to be.

We are here to help when your congregation or regional association is ready to begin this journey.

Introducing “Front Door, Back Door: Why People Join and Leave Churches” by J. Russell Crabtree

The story we tell ourselves…a person has a seminal experience in their life when they decide they need to begin or renew their spiritual journey by joining a Christian church. Since there are about 300,000 churches in the United States, they have lots of choices. They attend a few and pick out the one that seems the friendliest. They join. Their attendance at worship strengthens their experience of God. They begin to set aside time in their daily life for spiritual practice. They find that the more they get involved in the church, the more they are growing spiritually. Their participation in the church carries over into other aspects of their lives, including their work life, which they begin to see as an extension of their Christian ministry. As time goes on they become even more impressed by the dedication of the people of the church in general and of the leaders in particular. As the years pass—twenty, thirty, forty years—they find peace in knowing that this is the church where they will finish their life’s journey in the company of other, longtime members.

It all makes a neat package. There is only one problem.

Virtually none of it is true.

In this groundbreaking book, Front Door Back Door, Russ Crabtree explores some of the most basic assumptions that leaders make regarding the churches they serve and what happens in the lives of members who join, stay, and leave. It’s not just another book about losses; it offers insight and suggestions for creating learning congregations and developmental trajectories for their members.

In Front Door Back Door you will learn…

The characteristics of churches people tend to join and why there are so few of them.
The three things that churches tend to do well in developing the people who join them whether conservative, progressive, or somewhere in between.
The areas where people tend to coast without much growth even after years attending a typical church.
The areas where people tend to experience deterioration over time; the longer they stay in a typical church, the less positive they feel.

On the whole, churches are not learning. Churches with more seasoned members tend to fare no better than churches with more “rookies” in attendance in dealing with conflict, achieving their mission, or engaging their members.

The author proposes a core competency model that is aligned with a church’s particular mission so that both members and congregations can be more fruitful and, in the words of Jesus, bear fruit that abides.

Order Front Door, Back Door

An excerpt from our new book “Penguins in the Pews: Climate, Change and Church Growth” by J. Russell Crabtree

An Introduction from “Penguins in the Pews”

In a study published in Nature, scientists showed that over the past 50 years the numbers of emperor penguins in Antarctica have dropped by more than 50 percent. The problem: The current climate cannot support penguin populations, and emperor penguins in particular are having trouble adapting to the change.

Eight thousand miles to the north, a similar problem is devastating populations of Protestants where, over the past 50 years, membership in most mainline churches has dropped by more than half. The problem: like their penguin cousins, the current climate in most churches does not offer a compelling reason to belong, and members are having trouble adapting to the change.

Members realize that something must be done. When nearly 200,000 members from over 1,300 churches were asked where they would like the church to invest additional energy, they prioritized “develop a comprehensive plan to reach new members” as the first or second priority 92% of the time. With an average age over 53 years, the members of the typical mainline church are significantly older than the general population. Conscious of the demographic hole for younger cohorts in their congregations, 72% of churches ranked “make necessary changes to reach families with children and youth” as first or second as well.

The concern for numeric growth is undoubtedly a response to nearly 50 years of membership decline in mainline denominational churches. A review of the last ten years of data from the churches in the Holy Cow! Consulting database reveals that this decline continues, and is universal across all denominations. (See Figure 1)

Figure 1 Decline in Attendance Universal for Mainline Churches

decline

Congregational leaders are looking for resources that can help them address these priorities. When 20,000 leaders were asked where they wanted their middle judicatory to invest additional energy, “equipping leaders to reach new members” was the first or second priority 100% of the time. Given the opportunity, it is reasonable to assume that leaders would prioritize services from church consultants in a similar order.

Over the years, leaders have adopted a number of different perspectives on this decline as they guide churches.

In some quarters, it has been treated as a non-issue. From this perspective, churches are called to be faithful. Numeric growth or decline is in God’s hands. The advantage of this approach is that it frees leaders from the complexities involved in making new disciples and allows them to focus solely on issues bubbling up in the corporate consciousness.

A related approach has been to treat numeric decline as beneficial. The thought here is that many persons who joined the church in the 50’s and 60’s were members in name only. Their departure from the church has left a core of more committed members who can now be about a ministry unhampered by the inertia of half-heartedness.

A third approach has been to treat numeric growth as a bi-product of church vitality. If a church is healthy, it will automatically grow. If a church is not growing, it is a sign that something is internally amiss. This approach allows members to simply focus on the health of the church with the assumption that numeric growth will follow.

A fourth approach has been to engage the issue of church growth directly through programs that have a proven track record in other faith communities. What one church can do, another can do. The advantage of this approach is that it offers clarity through a set of programmatic blueprints.

An alternative approach is what I call an intelligent system growth strategy. In contrast to the perspectives above it is built on four core affirmations.

Church growth is the result of a core commitment to making disciples, whether understood as individual salvation or incorporation into a soul-saving community.
Church growth is ecological in nature. An unhealthy church environment tends to foster a decline in numbers rather than growth. The churches that are losing members at the fastest rates are those that are the least healthy.
Church growth occurs when strategies are employed that are tailored to a particular context. Programs adopted from other churches without consideration of climate and culture will generally fail.
Church growth strategies benefit from organizational intelligence, made possible by information technology, which provides valuable insights that can clarify factors that impede or enhance church growth.

I will say more about what I mean by an intelligent system in the next chapter.

This book is written for leaders at every level.

This book is for church leaders serving on planning teams of various kinds, most of whom serve churches with members who indicate that reaching new people is their highest priority.

This book is for the regional association leaders, conferences, dioceses, synods, presbyteries, and districts who are being asked by local leaders to make “equipping leaders to reach new members” their highest priority.

This book is for professional church consultants who shoulder the responsibility of guiding churches in directions that are both faithful and fruitful.

Much of this book is built on the approach detailed in the book Owl Sight: Evidence-Based Discernment and the Promise of Organizational Intelligence.[2] Readers will find Owl Sight to be a helpful preface to this one.

[1] http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=98565&page=1

[2] Crabtree, J. Russell, Owl Sight, Evidence-Based Discernment and the Promise of Organizational Intelligence for Ministry, Magi Press, 2012

Now Available: State of the Evangelical Church in America

The State of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America

An Organizational Intelligence Perspective

J. Russell Crabtree

$12.95 US · Paperback

ISBN 9780997768701

6 x 9 x 0.4 · 100 pages, MAGI Press

PURCHASE HERE

In his new book, The State of the ELCA, J. Russell Crabtree examines the perspectives, experiences, and aspirations of a large cross section of members in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. In his reflection on the responses of nearly 60,000 members to a variety of questions, he addresses a number of topics including:

• How does the experience of Lutherans compare with other mainline denominations?

• Which groups feel most positive and which groups feel less positive about their experience in the Lutheran church?

• What are some of the factors that make the difference between Lutheran churches that are experiencing vitality and those that are struggling?

• How are Lutherans experiencing life in their congregations over their lifecycle ranging from the teenage years through child bearing, child rearing, empty nest, and retirement?

• As they think about the future, what are the aspirations of Lutherans for their churches and how do these vary from Boomlets up through Boomers and the GI Generation?

• What are the motivating factors for giving among Lutherans and how do these differ from one congregation to another?

Get ready for a few surprises as you read the answers to these questions, but also discover Lutheran perspectives on Scripture, spiritual practices, pastoral transitions, and Synods.

The State of the ELCA ends on a positive note by summarizing interviews with the pastors of four transformational Lutheran churches, one large, one small, one more conservative, and one more progressive.

“…a must-read for congregational leaders, synod staffs, and synod councils.”

Bishop Wayne N. Miller

10429477_1539479202980070_182352615483068509_n As a former pastor, Russ Crabtree served in small, midsize, and large churches in New York and Ohio. In that role, he was active in his regional association and worked in the areas of strategic planning, energy conservation, human sexuality, church consultation, presbytery staffing, and administrative oversight. He has served as a consultant to every level of the church in areas such as succession planning, strategic planning, and organizational assessment. He has developed congregational and regional association assessment tools and has maintained a substantial database on church characteristics and congregations of all sizes and contexts.

Publication Date: August 2016

Author Events Coordinator: Shawn Kelly, shawnkelly.rn@gmail.com, 614.216.5537

Bulk Orders: russ@crowsfeetconsulting.com, 614.208.4090

Evidence Based Membership – Congregations owning their Data

We, at Holy Cow! Consulting, spend the largest portion of our communication minutes talking about evidence-based leadership, encouraging leaders to engage in a discernment process that integrates organizational intelligence into their leadership decision making.

Organizational intelligence makes something else possible: an evidence-based membership. An evidence-based membership is one that has learned how to integrate organizational intelligence into their behaviors.

For example, a church takes the CAT and discovers that it is in the Recovery Quadrant. In addition, a lack of flexibility appears to be the primary factor inhibiting their vitality.

In a politically-based membership, leaders try to win support for developing a more adaptable culture through their own relational cache. This is a top-down approach that inevitably invites polarization around the local configuration of relational networks.

In an evidence-based membership, the entire congregation confronts its own lack of flexibility, understands the trajectory of that organizational culture, and wrestles with the likely consequences of choosing to become more adaptable or remain settled. The focus of the discernment process shifts from how folks relate to a particular leader or leadership team to how they are going to deal with their own corporate and individual behavior.

The implications of this shift are profound and include:

Specifying clearer, more concrete changes in behavior for members who are committed to developing a more vital congregation.
Relieving pressure on young or new clergy who are thrust into systems with politically-based memberships that repeatedly cycle through conflicts that have little to do with him/her.
Developing change processes that are also bottom-up rather than cascading all change down from the top.

Developing an evidence-based membership requires all the steps of developing an evidence-based leadership, beginning with helping them understand that their biggest problem is that they don’t know what they don’t know.

We are not so naïve to believe that OI will (or should) eliminate the need for the political and relationally based components of leadership. An evidence-based membership frees leaders from spending all their time and energy answering WHY so that they can invest their leadership into WHAT’S NEXT.

Russ Crabtree
Founder of Holy Cow! Consulting

The small but mighty power that is the Transformational Church

Robyn and I spent the weekend with two churches. Both congregations were in the transformational quadrant of the energy-satisfaction map. Both have created vital worship experiences for their congregations. Both are flexible to change so they can be more effective in their missions. Their congregations have developed meaningful relationships with each other and there is trust in the decision-making and the leadership. There is a commitment to learning and quality educational programing – meeting their congregations in all stages of their life. They are both out in the community teaching, clothing, and feeding their neighbors. The difference between the two? One church has a weekly church attendance of just under 500 people. The other church has a weekly church attendance of 50 people.

We often hear from congregations that they feel challenged by their smallness. They do not have enough people, enough resources, enough hands to help. And there is truth in this. The challenge is real and it can be overwhelming. But this weekend reminded me that even the smallest of us can have enormous impact. We can share meals with each other. We can teach each other. We can heal. We can minister to the broken. We can sit with each other in times of great sorrow and share great joy. Whether there are 500 of us or 10, we can do all of these things.

In our work with all congregations, large or small, our charge is to help them on their journey to becoming the vibrant church that Jesus spoke of when he started with just twelve. The small and mighty can do amazing things.

Blessings as we all grow together,

Emily Swanson

President of Holy Cow! Consulting

Organizational Intelligence and Bearing Much Fruit

Jesus said that every tree is known by its own fruit.

William James captures the profundity of this simple statement: “The roots of a man’s virtue are inaccessible to us. Our practice is the only sure evidence.”

At the corporate level, organizational intelligence is indifferent to the internal processes, structures, and beliefs of a particular congregation or faith-based ministry. While we recognize that denominational distinctives, styles of worship, and congregational qualities are important to members, they are in many ways inaccessible to us as outsiders beyond the scribbles on our flip charts.

The focus of organizational intelligence is on the fruit of the ministry, not as we would judge it, but as members bear witness to it. What we are asking members to identify is the quality of shared life, in the most literal terms, the “love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control.” (Galatians 5:22-23)

We don’t use these exact words in OI because they are value-laden and subject to what is known as “idealistic distortion.” Idealistic distortion is the tendency to see one’s behavior in an overly positive manner. For example, when surveyed about whether they are good drivers, the great majority of respondents indicate they are “better than average.” Outside of Lake Wobegon, this is mathematically impossible!

When we speak of “satisfaction” we have good reason to believe that we are actually measuring aspects of love and peace. When we speak of “energy” we believe we are measuring aspects of joy and goodness. The hospitality that members offer to others (kindness), the capacity to manage conflicting differences (forbearance), and the willingness to follow leaders in a governance structure (faithfulness and self-control) are all expressions of this spiritual fruit.

Jesus indicated this to be the ultimate test of discipleship: “that you bear much fruit and so prove to be my disciples.” Notice that it is addressed corporately to disciples, that is, how we live in community. In this sense, engaging organizational intelligence is an act of corporate discipleship, looking beyond all the necessary processes at the roots to discover what is actually being produced as fruit.

Russ Crabtree

Founder of Holy Cow! Consulting

Bridging the gap between Symbol and Story

I was on a phone call a few years ago with three colleagues when I articulated my frequently stated belief that we “over-teach and under-train” in faith communities. The President of CareNet in Winston-Salem responded “And I would add that we under-experience.” Adding a few of my own words, I would say that faith communities tend to over-think and under-experience.

One indicator that we have fallen prey to these temptations is an excess of symbols that have not been converted into stories. Words are symbols of experiences; they are not the experiences themselves. I have a friend who used to say “Going to church is like checking into a cheap hotel room. There are lots of menu around but very few meals.” Talking about grace, peace, or salvation is quite different from experiencing grace, receiving peace, or finding that one has been saved in a real and substantial way.

I remember talking to a young Christian who said to me, “I keep hearing in church that we should listen to God. God never speaks to me.” I took note and kept listening. A few minutes later, he described a situation where he was driving down a rural roadway when a thought popped into his head. I simply said to him “Maybe that was God speaking to you.” He sat in silence for a moment, then smiled broadly as he exclaimed, “Wait a minute! Maybe you are right!” The words “God speaks to us” had moved off the menu to the meal, from symbol to story.

People are hungry for stories but faith communities are ready to tell far too few of them. On average, only 17% of members clearly agree that they feel comfortable telling faith stories. Yet those stories abound. If you ask a general audience to indicate by a raised hand (with closed eyes) if they have had a powerful experience of a divine presence either through nature, a near-death experience, a mystical encounter, a synchronicity, etc. the great majority would raise their hands.

The New York Times recently ran an article in the sports section on “Memorable Sports Apologies through the Years.” When you read through them (and do a little bit of self-reflection as you do), you realize that most of us do not know how offer, request, or receive forgiveness in any real life situation even though we have confessed our sins in hundreds of worship services. This is because we forget that “passing the peace” is a sign of the peace of Christ that needs to be given substance in real life. Only then does it move from menu to meal, from symbol to story.

People hearing about organizational intelligence for the first time often react to the perception that numbers have nothing to do with real life. In fact, they are little different from any other symbol in the church that has not been converted into story. Religious sounding words can be just as discarnate as numbers and decimal points.

Questions that begin with the words “Tell me about a time…” are good for converting symbols to stories. We “tell” stories. “Tell me about a time when you felt like there was excitement in the church and you weren’t simply going through the motions.” “Tell me about a time when you walked out of your church and felt a deep sense of wholeness and peace.”

Russ Crabtree

Founder, Holy Cow! Consulting

Organizational Intelligence and Community Impact

Most contemporary observers agree that a shift from membership to discipleship is now taking place. Younger generations in particular want to know how to impact the world, not simply maintain an institution.

Holy Cow! Consulting has been examining the organizational intelligence generated by churches that have added the Flow Module to their standard Church Assessment Tool. The Flow Module was developed in collaboration with the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta to measure the degree to which the impact of discipleship was “flowing” out into the world. Here are some of the findings from a “typical” church.

In response to the statement On the whole, I would say that my current level of engagement to impact the world as an expression of my Christian discipleship is… About 40% of respondents indicate it is “lower than I would like it to be,” and about 10% indicate it is “much lower than I would like it to be.” Roughly half indicate it is “about right.”

In addition, one in two respondents indicates that they do not volunteer any time each month serving the community or world. The fact that about 50% of respondents indicate they make no contribution to the community or world at all combined with their admitted dissatisfaction with their level of impact suggests significant untapped potential.

In spite of the theological affirmation that work in the world is vocation, that is a calling to serve God, almost half of respondents indicate that their work is “just” or “mostly” a way of making a living.

What are the factors that have the biggest impact on whether a person decides to engage an opportunity of service? In the typical church, the top two are:

The degree to which opportunities are a good fit for the person’s gifts and interests.
The effectiveness of the opportunity in making a real difference in the person’s life and in the lives of others.

However, these vary somewhat from one church to another. For example, in one church, How well opportunities fit into my schedule and lifestyle is a top priority. The only way to know how a particular church is doing in equipping disciples versus developing members is through Organizational Intelligence (OI).

However, churches cannot simply decide to shift all their energy to external ministry. The OI is very clear: equipping members to serve in the world is no substitute for quality internal ministries such as worship, pastoral leadership, participatory decision-making, hospitality, and spiritual formation. As in baseball, you cannot skip the bases no matter how well you are hitting the ball out of the park.

Tag: Church membership