Church Metrics 101: The Top 20 Things to Measure About Your Church

Church metrics is an important subject for church leaders. Below you will find  20 very important, if not the most important things you should know about your church. Keep in mind that these are things to measure about your church as an organization.  These metrics are not the top things to measure in terms of individual spiritual formation. The topic of measuring discipleship is extremely important and I cover that topic through numerous blog posts including the foundational overview of the Vision Frame.

I have told pastors for a long time I wouldn't consider pastoring again unless I had the congregation's commitment to measure these 20 things at least every two years. I believe these are essential church metrics.

But first the backstory...

For the last 15 years, the Auxano team has developed, used and refined a survey designed completely around the culture, vision  and strategic mid-term decision-making priorities of the church. I have led this process by turning over and inside out every possible church survey I could find. After five years I felt like we had an excellent church metrics template as we helped local churches with their specific needs and challenges.

We  have never advertised this product.  Why?  Despite its incredible benefit to our church clients we did not have the capacity to offer the service to churches unless they were engaged in our core experience called the Vision Framing process. The desire to bring this to more churches eventually led me to LifeWay Research. We have worked with since 2013 to bring the best survey to local churches. We call it the RealTime Survey. 

We now have the opportunity to serve churches with the Realtime Survey even if they are not in a consulting process with us. If you are interested you can fill out the form below.

Here is what we measure:

#1: Percent of new attenders in prior two years

#2: Guest percentage

#3: Profile of new attenders and guest including reason for attending

#4 Age of the church vs. age of the community

#5 Age of church vs. the age of new attenders in the prior two years

#6 Spiritual growth satisfaction

#7 Sense of connection to the church

#8 Giving patterns

#9 Adult conversion percentage

#10 Influence of ministries

#11 Group assimilation percentage

#12 Group assimilation obstacle identification

#13 Assimilation rate for groups and membership (if applicable)

#14 Serving assimilation percentage

#15 Serving assimilation obstacles

#16 Invitation activity

#17 Invitation obstacles

#18 Total assimilation percentages

#19 Strategic direction question cluster one

#20 Strategic direction question cluster two

What other things would you include on this list?

The tool we use to get this info is what we call the RealTime Survey. Feel free to download our PDF about the survey by clicking here.

If you are interested in learning more, fill out your info here and I'll make sure one of my team reaches out to you.

Before you do, please be aware that most of the churches we serve are over 200 people in attendance. The cost of the RealTime survey is $7,900 which includes consultation, custom survey design, data entry, extensive data analysis, colorful chart-based reporting and a virtual 3-hour debrief of the reports. We have worked with hundreds of churches that are blown away by the the amazing value of the survey, but it is a serious investment. Because there are so many standardized surveys out there, this is probably not like any other survey you have done in the past!