Future of Church: Measuring the "Effectiveness" of a Hybrid Ministry

Your church's top two success measures likely involve attendees and donations, or, to be a bit crass, "butts and bucks."

Don't believe me? Check out your congregation's annual report. Notice the data on attendance/membership. Notice the data on giving. See any other graphs? See any other numbers? Most likely, you do not.

Finances and attendance have long been the indicators of an "effective" ministry because they provide a proxy for "growth." If both numbers are going up and to the right, we have a growing ministry, and by the standards of the capitalist West, that's a good thing, right?

There's only one problem: donations are down. Attendance is down. Giving will continue to dwindle (thanks in part to the Trump tax law), membership will continue to fall. Sure, some churches will manage to be a temporary outlier. They'll find a way to increase their attendance, and drive up their giving - but this will come at the expense of other neighborhood churches. As Nona Jones tells us in her book on social media ministry, their success will be the demise of other congregations in their hometown.

If you're a member of the clergy, do yourself and your church leadership a favor: divest yourself of these success measures. They'll only wear you down, they'll only demoralize your community. These are the success measures of the "Christendom" church, when our surrounding culture created Christians for us, when the American way meant attendance in a building at a set time each and every week. These measures cannot guide us into the church's future. But what can?

If the future of church is to be a strategic blend of the online and the offline, with the objectives of collaborative service and faith formation, then attendance and giving are relatively meaningless. They can help to plan a budget document, but aren't much good beyond that. After all, how can you extrapolate an intent to live a life of faithful service from a stack of dollar bills? How can you find a commitment to missional collaboration by tracking the quantity butts on a bench?

It's clear that the future of church needs a replacement set of "success" indicators, "KPIs," or measurement tactics. For those who are curious what could replace revenue and retention, I would offer the following suggestion: the future of the church is about extending an invitation, then equipping for service. The future of the church is about creating a culture of collaboration so that all can participate in God's global mission. To that end, we have to arrive at a set of measures that somehow quantify inviting, equipping, and collaborating.

In a digital age church, inviting, equipping, and collaborating happen in a hybrid of the virtual and the face-to-face, through a blurring of distinctions between the online and the offline. To measure the effectiveness of the hybrid church, then, we must start by understanding the extent to which the online and the offline can be integrated in the life of a faith community. There are three concepts that allow us to do just that: coverage, quality, and connection.

Coverage measures the breadth of digital integration within a church community. For every act of service, for every act of worship, and for every conversation, there needs to be a digital invitation. Coverage, then, is measured by the percentage of church happenings that could be simultaneously accessed both online and offline. Was a worship service livestreamed? Then it met the requirement for coverage. Did a board meeting have a Zoom link? Then it has coverage. Coverage happens when we make an intentional effort to invite collaboration, especially collaboration that takes place through a screen.

Quality analyzes the depth of digital integration. For every opportunity to connect digitally, we need to understand whether the connection was seamless and easy. Quality is a subjective measure of integration, displayed on a sliding scale of low to high-quality experiences. If a worship service was livestreamed, but the camera was at the back of the sanctuary and the audio was patchy, the quality was low. If a Bible Study provided a conference call dial-in, and used a Jabra or USB microphone to improve the audio quality for those joining remotely, the quality was high. Quality happens when we focus on hospitality, on treating those who join our life together through technology as equal collaborators in the mission we share.

Finally, connection looks at the degree to which technology was actually used. Connection is a quantitative measure that resembles but is not synonymous with attendance. For every piece of blog content we created in support of a sermon series, how many read it? For every sermon we posted to Wistia, how many watched? Connection-based metrics, which look at raw engagement metrics, are still useful in the hybrid church, because they can tell us where our digital invitations are going unseen. If we find that our digital presence is going unnoticed, we might find that we have some further work to do in defining who we are called to be, and what we are called to do, in this digital age.

These three concepts have at their core three questions. In everything we do as church:

• Did we make digital collaboration possible?

• Did we do everything to make digital collaboration a high-quality experience?

• And did anyone actually participate digitally?

We can learn a great deal from these questions. They can help us to live into our new normal, to reimagine Christian community in a digital age. But they can't help us if we continue to ask the old questions. They can't help us if they go unasked.

Hybrid ministry in an eventual new normal will be quite different from the church we experienced in February 2020. Accordingly, we need to measure "effectiveness" differently. In doing so, we might just find that what we're after as church has nothing do with "effectiveness," and everything to do with service: collaborative, inclusive service, open to all, in response to God's eternal call.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes."

Book Review: From Social Media to Social Ministry, by Nona Jones

If you manage a church social media account, chances are, you run the account like a digital bulletin board.

And if that's the approach you take, posting information, linking to events, and using the platform to inform, you're missing the point of social media. So argues Nona Jones in her book, "From Social Media to Social Ministry" (Zondervan, 2020. $18.99).

Jones, who serves as the Head of Global Faith-Based Partnerships at Facebook, argues convincingly that faith leaders are not using social media to it's fullest potential. We're using social media for advertising, but not for equipping, for marketing, but not for ministry.

By relying on one-way communication, tracking the wrong metrics, and delegating account management to unqualified staff, churches are losing out on the opportunity to create disciples in digital spaces.

"While a social media plan primarily focuses on sharing content to get likes, comments, and shares, a social ministry strategy focuses on building relationships and facilitating connections between and among people so that discipleship can happen."

-Nona Jones, "From Social Media to Social Ministry"

For Jones, social media generally and Facebook, in particular, offer a potential remedy to a decline in church attendance and membership. A commitment to ministry on social media would certainly be better for the church than other widespread "relevance-boosting" practices, including removing crosses and Bibles from church buildings and improving production quality!

To that end, Jones encourages to think about social media not as a bulletin board, but as a campus. She argues that a faith community's Facebook page ought to function as a ministry start-up, with a campus pastor, a team of equipped and compensated staff, new content published daily, and a commitment to multi-directional conversation. Jones is correct in her assertion that social ministry depends less on polish and more on leadership, less on quality and more on intentionality.

Available now wherever books are sold

The book is an important contribution in helping churches to think of the web not as a place to post an invitation to attend worship, but as a mission field, where church leaders establish relationships and form disciples for lives of faithful service.

Jones' well-reasoned argument is limited in part by her assertion that Facebook is "the only true social media platform." Arguing that Facebook is the only platform to support multi-directional conversation as opposed to mere content consumption, Jones' model dismisses the importance and relevance of Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, and others. While it's true that Facebook is far and away the most utilized social media platform, it's influence is waning amongst younger generations, necessitating consideration if not engagement with emerging digital channels. At a practical level, I would have appreciated hearing Jones' suggestions for low-tech, low-staff churches who may not have the resources to navigate an increasingly fractured (if not fractious!) social media landscape.

The book also decides to veer away from the thornier issues surrounding Facebook and other social media platforms. As a handbook to social media usage in the church, the book would have benefitted from a discussion on the numerous ethical and privacy concerns surrounding social media giants, including the commodification of user data and the easy dissemination of conspiracy theories.

Still, "From Social Media to Social Ministry" offers an important lesson for church leaders of all denominational backgrounds and theological commitments. If the church is to be relevant (or, resonant) in this digital age, it must learn how to build relationships and engage in thoughtful conversations within these spaces. This will require a long process of learning and iteration. Jones' book is a helpful first step towards the church's digital future.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes," a book about being the church in a tech-shaped culture.

Shut-ins and Shut-outs: Why Inclsuion is Key to Understanding the Church's Hybrid Future

At the time, the pastor's request seemed so altruistic, so indicative of what's good about the Christian tradition.

"We're recruiting new volunteers to take Communion to our shut-ins," the pastor said. "Since we haven't had enough volunteers these last few weeks, several of our shut-ins haven't been visited."

Here was an opportunity for church members to step up and live out their faith by taking the Lord's Supper to those who were physically unable to gather for Sunday worship. Here was a chance to demonstrate faithful discipleship, to demonstrate that those beset by disability and malady still mattered in the life of the faith community.

I sat in the pew. I nodded my head, hoping that someone would sign up via the bulletin board in the narthex. My thoughts turned to the coffee and donuts to come.

Such statements were a fixture of the church's previous operating model, a way of being in community that prioritized in-person gatherings as the only way of being included in the church's life together.

Such statements were a fixture when being a church goer meant being in the physical presence of other members, receiving the sacraments directly from the pastor. Such statements were common when those who could physically walk, kneel, eat, drink, hear, and speak were known as "members" or "worshippers." Such statements were prevalent when those who could not do those things were known as "shut-ins."

Prior to COVID-19, we didn't take a critical look at these statements. It's about time that changed.

To use a word like "shut-in" is to suggest that there is something meaningfully different or "other" about those physically, mentally, or spiritually unable to gather for worship or fellowship.

While it's been a useful organizing framework in managing church practices like visiting the sick and bringing the sacraments to the ill, it's a problematic label. It implies that in this sanctuary, within this house, we worship. At your house, where you are shut-in, you wait. It suggests that at this time and in this place, we experience grace. At another time and in another place, you receive the leftovers. It indicates that in this building on this date, we are community. In your building at a date to be determined, you are on your own.

Perhaps we didn't know any better.

Prior to the pandemic, who would have imagined that our church buildings would close for over one year, shutting all of us out from in-person worship, prayer, and sacrament? Who would have imagined that case surges and safer at home orders would shut all of us into our homes and dwellings, cutting us off from what had long defined life together in the Christian church?

The pandemic is an unequivocal disaster. Yet in the church, it has erased the hierarchy of the worshipper and the shut-in. As we connect to worship and with our communities through exclusively digital forms, the pandemic has put us all on equal ground.

Now, as vaccines roll off the assembly line, we can see glimpses of an eventual new normal. Our sanctuaries may not open as quickly as we would like, but they will open. In-person fellowship may not resume on a convenient timeline but it will resume. But if we simply go back to the way things were done, when we saw the in-person as the best or even the only way to be the church, we will have learned nothing.

The church's future is a hybrid of virtual and in-person connections, where there is no distinction or hierarchy between the two. In a hybrid ministry, there are no value judgments between the one who connects to a faith community through social media and the one who walks through the doors sanctuary.

If we are to live into this hybrid future, we can have no use for the "shut-in" label. If we are to achieve a hybrid Christian identity, we must work towards parity of experience. We must work towards equity.

As Christians, we will always visit the sick and injured. We will always bring the sacraments to those in need. But as a church, it's our responsibility not to see the sick, injured, and disabled as outsiders, as shut-ins. It's our calling to see them as equals, as collaborators in working towards the mission we share.

So when someone asks me where they should start in thinking about hybrid ministry, I won't tell them about Zoom or web cameras or websites. I'll talk them to think about inclusion, I'll talk to them about equity.

I'll encourage them to think about practices that build a bridge between the virtual and the in-person, that equally affirm the value and dignity of those who can physically gather and those who must gather at a distance.

I might say something about feasible technology use. But I'll always come back to the idea that the Holy Spirit gathers all of us to be in community together. The way we approach our eventual new normal will reveal whether all really means all. The way we approach hybrid ministry will reveal what we really believe about the priesthood of all believers that we know as church.

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@ryanpanzer is the author of "Grace and Gigabytes," available now wherever books are sold.