Like you, I love the church and am enamored with Jesus' commission to make disciples of all nations.  Years ago as a university student, I was heavily involved in a college disciple-making ministry.   During that time I consumed Leroy Eims' book, The Lost Art of Disciplemaking.  It gave me a framework with clear objectives for becoming and making disciples - devoted followers of Christ. 

To give you an idea of what I'm talking about, here is a list of some of the objectives right out of the appendix of this

 book. (There are 30 listed there.) 

A few weeks ago, in a blog post entitled Groups consistency, I talked about using attendance as a sign that points to faithfulness.  And faithfulness is a pre-requisite character quality for choosing leaders who multiply the ministry.  (2 Timothy 2:2)

In the same way, attendance is a sign for pastors and church staff that something may be going on in a person's life they are called to shepherd.

In discipleship discussions, we often quote 2 Timothy 2:2 as a pillar text for understanding discipleship that multiplies disciples.  The idea, of course, is that Paul invested in training Timothy and was encouraging him to invest in other people who would invest in others.  

Notice the adjective that Paul uses to describe the people in whom Timothy was to invest his time.  Depending on your translation, the word is generally reliable (NIV, NLT), or faithful (ESV, NASB, KJV).  It is someone in whom you trust.

The ways churches are meeting at this point in the pandemic are as diverse as the church itself.  I know great churches that haven't met live on Sundays since March of last year.  And I know great churches that have been meeting live since July and now don't even require masks or social distance.  This is the beauty of God's design and the difference in the communities our churches serve. 

For nearly every church, the second or third largest line item in their budget is related to facility operations.  This includes the care, maintenance, energy consumption, capital reserves, etc.  All of this can be lumped into the cost of facilities. 

Churchteams was built around the idea of growing a church using groups as the common building material for every ministry. This means that everything that involves more than one person is managed as a group. 

Every worship service, small group, class, committee, ministry team, leadership team, service team, mission team, event, and even assimilation step is managed as a group. 

This is one of the design constructs that makes our software unique, powerful and user-friendly.  Once understood, ministry rocks of all sizes are formed together to become a solidly built organization.

I started this series more than a month ago but got sidestracked on topics related to the Covid 19 crisis.  The pandemic has only ramped up.  But, for a moment, let's refocus on how we help a church measure how well they are multiplying disciples.

Jesus didn't mentor his disciples just to make them better men.  His goal was for them to mentor other people who would do the same thing.  Paul was super clear on this multiplication model of mentoring in 2 Timothy 2:2.

We who are captivated by the privilege and challenge of this calling are part of a growing movement of churches owning the multiplication vision.  Our experience has shown us that consistency and conversations are two powerfully helpful measures of multiplication.

Last week we were at the Exponential Conference in Orlando.  It is an exciting gathering of thousands of people devoted to multiplying leaders and planting churches. Our many conversations with men and women enthusiastically pursuing a life of significance through mentoring and multiplication reminded me again of why we started Churchteams. 

Last  fall I started a blog series on Small Groups called Aim Small.  My hope with this series is to bring together our best learnings about managing small groups that make disciples. 

In the last post, I showed you how attendance helps you recognize the trust level in your groups.  Like heat  is vital to baking bread, so trust is essential to authentic relationships.  

A friend of ours Damon Stoddard, a master black belt six sigma expert in Seattle, was volunteering to lead the groups ministry in his church about a decade ago when he called to ask me if I thought that TRUST would be a good way to measure the health of a small group.

 I was familiar with Patrick Lencioni's book on the Five Dysfunctions of A Team that identified Trust as the foundation upon which a team is built.  But,  had never heard anyone suggest applying trust to evaluating the health of small groups.  I thought it was a brilliant idea and told him that I thought it would be a great measure for group health.

He then pointed out to me that one of the leading indicators of trust in relationships is consistency and asked if we could measure the consistency of a group.  A few years earlier, we started calculating the average attendance per group whether they met once or five times that month¹.  So, all we needed was another column to divide that number by the enrollment in the group.

Think about this for a moment.  If you are going to live out the "One Anothers" in your small group.  If you are going to do "life together" with someone else. You are going to have to TRUST yourself to them.  That's how discipleship works.  Spiritual transformation is only going to happen if you trust those helping you achieve it.

Who are you going to trust? Friends that are consistently there for you. Faithful people who you are going to entrust your life message to (2 Timothy 2:2). Though just showing up isn't the full equation to measure trust, it is a very measurable indicator.  

Damon's next question helped us sharpen the measure, "at what consistency rate would you say a group is healthy and unhealthy?"  I had been leading small groups in churches for 18 years at that point and quickly responded. ²

80 to 100% Consistency = Healthy

Under 50% Consistency = Unhealthy

We sent him the data for his church.  He did the analytics and discovered that 5/12 groups were above 80%, 4 were between 50 and 80%, and 3 were below 50%.  So, he got his pastor and went to the 3 groups and discovered that all 3 of them had issues they needed help with.

Within a few months we created our Monthly Small Group Health report that we email to our clients who want it for their church.  It's an Excel spreadsheet that adds a new sheet each month with a summary of group health within a ministry area.

Groups are organized by consistency rate, not alphabetically.  Blue zone groups average 80% and above.  These people love their group.  They even plan their vacation around group times. These are your leadership development groups.  

Yellow zone groups are your average groups.  Nothing outstanding generally, but also nothing to necessarily worry about.  The Red zone groups are your focus groups for the next month.  If the small group pastor / director and coaches don't do anything else this month, they need to know what's up with these groups.

Of course the output of the data is only as good as the input.  But through trial and error with hundreds of churches we've developed a system to get 100% response from group leaders each week.  It combines technology people are already committed to with a system of accountability appropriate to each leadership level.  Join me for a Small Group Webinar to learn more.     

¹  Small groups that meet in homes don't necessarily meet every week like traditional adult Sunday School classes do.  This skews monthly attendance.  To solve this we developed a metric that uses the sum of the average attendance (blue) instead of the average of the weekly summed attendance (red).  This is a far better way to compare tradition Adult Sunday School numbers to small group numbers.  

² For larger groups that typically meet in classroom like Adult Sunday School we generally lower the percentage rate for health by 20 points.  i.e. for "Small" Groups of 20 or more:

60 to 100% Consistency = Healthy

Under 30% Consistency = Unhealthy

So a typical Adult Sunday School of 30 is still considered in the Blue Zone with an average of 18 and in the Red Zone when it averages 9 or les.

When I was on church staff, at the end of every month I would put together a small group summary for our leadership team to review.  I would run the "Attendance by Group" report in Churchteams and paste the numbers into an Excel spreadsheet.  Then I would copy and edit the formulas to complete the report.  It took most of a day.

After a couple of years doing this every month and many conversations with other small group pastors, we automated this report so that it is delivered to your inbox every month.  In developing it, we realized that every church needs feedback from their database for 3 different levels of leadership.  All of these are included in this Monthly Small Group Report.