Measuring Missional

Then I looked up, and there before me was a man with a measuring line in his hand.   I asked, “Where are you going?”  He answered me, “To measure Jerusalem, to find out how wide and how long it is.”   Zechariah 2:1,2

In 1998 I returned to the UK from Spain where I had been church planting for the best part of fifteen years.  During that time I had tried to keep up-to-date with new titles on evangelism and church planting and had become vaguely aware of some new thinking which had birthed the adjective “missional”.  But nothing could have prepared me for the reality which awaited me – “missional” was everywhere.  A neologism that did not exist fifteen years ago (and which still prompts an error message from my spellchecker) generates nearly two million hits on Google.  Furthermore, “missional” has been given such varied definitions, and was attached to such a wide range of activities, that even some leading “missional” thinkers were suggesting “a moratorium on the use of the M-word until we have stepped back, taken a deep breath, and reconsidered what we really mean by it”.

Defining “missional” with any precision is no easy task.  Perhaps the most helpful simple definition of “missional” church is that of “…a community of God’s people that defines itself and organises its life around its real purpose of being an agent of God’s mission to the world”.  However, when asked to elucidate further on what that looks like in practice, authors often revert to listing “missional” characteristics or key values.  Ostensibly, the more details that are provided in the definition, the less ambiguous it is, but in practice this is not the case.  In fact, the more details are given the more ambiguous the definition becomes and this is certainly the case with “missional”.  To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, of the making of books defining missional there is no end.

Rather than engage in a meta-analysis of the definitions of “missional” I want to approach the issue from a different direction by considering how “missional” might be measured. 

People

The oldest and perhaps most enduring “missional” measure is the counting of heads.  An in-depth study of the Book of Acts reveals that Luke was very concerned about measuring the precise number of people who were adopting The Way.  Centuries later, William Carey’s “Enquiry” set forth his estimates of the growth of Christianity around the world and the challenge of the millions of heathens yet to hear the Christian gospel.  And in the 20th Century Donald McGavran challenged mission thinking to make use of sociological tools arguing that “the numerical approach is essential to understanding church growth.  The Church is made up of countable people and there is nothing particularly spiritual in not counting them.  Men use the numerical approach in all worthwhile human endeavour”.

Yet the counting of heads implies a certain criteria being established which permits us to distinguish between those who belong to the Christian community and those who do not.  Until recently attendance at a regular act of worship served this purpose but increasingly there is a realisation that this simply will not do.  Not all those who attend are necessarily disciples of Jesus nor do all those who are disciples “attend” in the way they used to.  Following Paul Hiebert, Hirsch and Frost have suggested a move away from the concept of church as a Bounded Set to that of a Centred Set which focuses on discipleship rather than conversion or membership.  However, counting these people is not straightforward since they often fall outside the “bounds” of what we might call empirical Christian spirituality. 

 
Swarch and Hirsch.png
 

Congregations

The second measure is analogous to the first in that it also involves counting people but no longer as individuals but rather as Christian communities.  Once again we might turn to the New Testament or Church History to trace the growth of Christianity through the birthing of new Christian communities.  However, it is sufficient to recall how often the planting (or the closing) of new congregations is used to measure the vitality or not of a given denomination or the breadth of Christian churches in any given country.  Take for example, David Goodhew’s book which we reviewed in the last edition of Vista which states that “it is likely that over 5,000 new churches have been started in Britain in the 30 years since 1980”.

Counting “missional” communities is perhaps even more difficult than counting people.  Many of the defining characteristics of these communities (that they are, for example, incarnational, locally focussed, open to all, with only minimal structure, an adaptive leadership, and a movement mentality) operate against their measurement by normal metrics.  Some communities are all but invisible except to those who form part of them.  Others exist within other congregations, either completely or partly, further complicating their categorization.  Still others are philosophically opposed to “identification” as a congregation at all seeing themselves as a Jesus-centred organic movement rather than what we might again call an empirical Christian church.

Values

The third broad measure we might wish to consider is that of qualities or values.  In a sense these are the very things which distinguish individual Christian disciples and communities of Jesus followers as being different from any other gathering of men and women.  God’s purpose for Israel and for the Church has always been to “choose a people for his name from the Gentiles” (Acts 15:14) that their lives should embody values which glorify God: “You are the light of the world … let your light shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your Father in heaven” (Matthew 5:14-15). 

With the formulation of the Nicene Creed, the four “marks” of the church (“one, holy, catholic and apostolic”) established four measures by which churches could be judged.  Unfortunately all too often through Church history, rather than serving as measures of intrinsic quality they were used to impose uniformity in doctrine, liturgy and practice.  Van Engen has suggested reframing these values of the church as unifying, sanctifying, reconciling and witnessing which is a step in the right direction but still some way from practical “missional” measures for a local congregation. Even before the emergence of “missional”, fresh attempts were being made to measure the qualitative growth of churches.  Christian Schwartz suggested eight quality characteristics in his book Natural Church Development and the National Church Life Survey, developed in Australia but used also in the UK and the Netherlands, sought to measure not only attendance but also the vitality of existing congregations.  However, few of these traditional metrics translate easily to “missional” realities.

To illustrate this problem it is perhaps helpful to contrast Schwartz’s eight quality characteristics with Hirsch’s six elements of mDNA (missionalDNA) which he says are the “central guiding mechanisms (which are) necessary for the reproduction and sustainability of genuine missional movements”.

Space will not permit me to engage in a detailed comparison but what is immediately clear is that despite both authors arguing that church growth takes place according to biotic mechanisms (Schwartz’ term) the two sets are fundamentally different.  In some ways these lists illustrate powerfully just how different the evangelistic-attractional and missional-incarnational models of church are. However, the issue at focus in this article is the measurability of “missional” and to this I wish to return in conclusion.

Can we measure “missional”?

To date there are few books which have dealt with the challenge of recalibrating our metrics for “missional”.  Reggie McNeal’s Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church is one such book.  Whilst oriented perhaps to traditional churches which are seeking to become more missional rather than already extant missional communities, the book contains many “scorecards” covering areas like people, prayer, facilities, finances, leadership, technology, suggesting ways in which missional values might be measured.  Here is one example:

  • Number of people reporting   improved marriages over time

  • Number of people reporting improved friendships over time

  • Number of people being mentored

  • Number of people serving as mentors

  • Number of people able to articulate life mission

  • Number of people serving other people in some venue

  • Number of people practicing intentional blessing strategy for those around them

  • Number of people growing in financial giving to kingdom causes

What is immediately clear is that despite the supposed shift of focus from the internal to the external, the measures are still in essence a headcount of self-declared “missional” activities.  Much more helpful are the three groups of “missional indicators” found in Michael Frost’s recent book The Road to Missional.  The indicators were developed in partnership with a major denomination under three categories – announcement, demonstration and the way of Jesus and are reproduced in Table 1

These indicators are a challenging list of requirements for any missional community but I would suggest that much of the benefit was in the process of selecting these indicators not just applying some external measure.  As Frost himself says “mission… must be lived out incarnationally, in close proximity to those to whom we’ve been sent; a mission that is cross-shaped and calls its followers to the disciplines of sacrifice, service, love, and grace; and a mission that delights in beauty, flavour, joy and friendship, that lifts us up and fills us with the same fullness of life we see in Jesus.”

Whether our starting place is the four marks of the Creed or Hirsch’s six elements of missionalDNA, if we genuinely want to measure “missional” it will require new measures, perhaps even unique measures for each local situation.  Clearly this will involve each “missional” initiative engaging in a deep reflection both on the eternal values of Christian community revealed in God’s word and on the local qualities that must be embodied for effective incarnational witness.  Only then will our metrics correspond to our contextual realities.  Only then we will get beyond counting heads, congregations or arbitrary values.  Only then can we truly measure Jerusalem, as Zechariah was invited to do, with anything like the dimensions of the Spirit.

Jim Memory 

References
Mike Frost, The Road to Missional, Baker Books, 2011

David Goodhew, Church Growth in Britain: 1980 to the Present, Ashgate, 2012

Alan Hirsch, The Forgotten Ways, Brazos, 2006.

Donald McGavran, Understanding Church Growth, Eerdmans, 1970.

Reggie McNeal, Missional Renaissance: Changing the Scorecard for the Church, Jossey-Bass, 2009.

Christian Schwartz, Natural Church Development, Moggerhanger, 1996.

Charles Van Engen, God’s Missionary People, Baker Books, 1991.