Conclusion:

Let’s review what it takes to transform and grow your programs and ministries for children and youth:

You have to figure out how you’re going to measure growth, because you will get the growth that you measure for.

Then there are four steps to growth:

One: You must have a compelling vision, and I suggest that compelling vision is encompassed within four big goals: to have fun and build community; to gain religious literacy; to gain the skills associated with liberal religion; and to prepare kids to become Unitarian Universalist adults who are sensitive, moral, joyful, and have integrity.

Two: You must build an infrastructure that will support your transformative and growing program, including $1,500 per kid, one adult volunteer per two kids, 25 square feet of physical space per kid, a good enough program, and plans in place to continue growth.

Three: You can pluck low-hanging fruit as it is available, to help motivate and encourage everyone involved.

Four: You must have at least five years’ worth of patience; and if your congregation is on a stalled growth plateau, you will need twice as much time, a decade’s worth of patience.

And the whole purpose of this is growth and transformation. We want children to grow up into caring, sensitive, moral adults with deep integrity. We want our congregations to grow so that we can accommodate all those people out there who want to join us. They might not yet know that they want to join us, but they are waiting for our fun, moving, life-transforming message. Sometimes we literally save people’s lives, and that alone would be enough justification to expand our reach through growth. We also transform people’s lives (including our own lives) on a less dramatic level because we provide a place where we can makes sense out of life: we make sense out of life being part of a community where we can share our deepest selves; we make sense out of life through an intellectual knowledge of religion that helps us be better citizens in a multi-cultural, multi-religious world; we make sense out of life by gaining personal skills like meditation and singing that help us find meaning; we make sense out of life by joining a religious community whose values we share and believe to be of utmost importance.

Questions from participants, with my answers.

Step four: Have patience and hold on for at least five years

I got spoiled in my first job as a director of religious education. In my first three years on the job, we more than tripled enrollment, and probably tripled attendance. That first job gave me the impression that growth is easy, and that it happens quickly.

Sometimes that is in fact true: sometimes everything comes together and you get explosive growth in a short time without much effort. But most of the time, it takes years of hard work to get growth that you measure in a few percentage points each year.

Or, and this is more common than even slow growth, you find yourself stalled on a plateau for years at a time. Let’s talk about these growth plateaus for a moment. Growth plateaus often occur when the year-round average attendance of adults and children in a congregation is between 35 and 60, and again when attendance is between 150 and 200. When I look at 2011 attendance data on the UUA Web site, I can see several congregations in our district that may be stuck on one of these plateaus. Chico, Lake County, Sacramento Community Church, Stockton, and Sonora may be stuck on that lower plateau. Oakland, San Francisco, and San Mateo may be on that higher plateau. You may be interested to know that congregations that have stalled on growth plateaus seem far more likely to experience serious conflict — and watch out for conflict: it can stop growth dead, so you will want to manage conflict carefully so that it does not stop growth.

The only way to figure out for sure if your congregation is stalled on one of these plateaus is to check attendance data going back at least a decade. My own congregation in Palo Alto is reporting an average attendance of 208, but looking at our attendance data shows that we’ve been stalled on a growth plateau since about 1998. A couple of times we have broken 200 average attendance, only to fall back below that number after a year or two.

Growth usually takes patience, and it usually takes years. If you’re stalled on a growth plateau, it can take twice as many years and far more patience. If you discover that you’re stalled on a growth plateau, the best advice I can offer you is to stick to the basics: Carefully measure enrollment, attendance, and pledge income. Continue to maintain an administrative structure that provides adequate funding, adequate volunteers, adequate physical space, and a good enough program. Pluck low-hanging fruit when it’s available. And have patience.

The good news is that you don’t have to be a genius to create growth in your programs and ministries for children and youth. You just have to be good enough — and you have to be patient.

Any questions about having patience and holding on for at least five years?

Now on to the conclusion….

Step three: Plucking some low-hanging fruit

A good deal of the work of creating transformative growth is pretty boring behind-the-scenes work. It can be tough motivating people to keep at it, year after year. So it is wise every once in a while to come up with some spectacular results to keep people interested and motivated. Let me tell you about a few tried-and-true means for doing this:

(1) If the attendance of children and youth drops off in your congregation during the summer, one of the easiest ways to boost attendance is to improve your summer offerings. This is what the Palo Alto religious education committee and I decided to do a year ago. We had tried all kinds of showy programs in the summer, and none of them had worked. One of our key volunteers said that what she’d like to do was chuck all programs altogether, and simply focus on our first big goal of having fun and building community. She said she’d take the kids to the park every Sunday during the summer to play and have fun. This is a fine example of a good-enough program. Actually, it was too good: it boosted our summer attendance so much that we saw a 21% increase in overall attendance; we wanted good enough, and now we have this big success we are expected to match again. Nevertheless, in many congregations, boosting summer attendance is an easy way to pluck some low-hanging fruit.

(2) Run a special program in the late spring when attendance usually drops off. Late spring projects that have been successful for me: taking 8 weeks to rehearse a play; the old Marketplace 29 A.D. Vacation Bible School program; a program on peacemaking. I’ve done this year after year in congregations I’ve served; it doesn’t always boost attendance, but it always at least provides a welcome change of pace for volunteers. And it’s usually easier to manage than trying to drum up enthusiasm to continue regular Sunday school classes through the bitter end of May or into June.

(3) Parties, overnights, and trips all generate enthusiasm, and often provide a small but measurable boost in attendance. I’ve taken youth groups to Chicago and to New Orleans. I’ve run overnights for grades 5 and up. I’ve helped organize parties for classes, for volunteers, and for the whole Sunday school. These projects are easy enough to do (except the youth group trips), and while the boost in attendance may be small, it is always welcome.

What I’m calling “low-hanging fruit” are things that are not going to create the kind of long-term upward growth trend that you can create through the boring work of management and building administrative infrastructure. But they are things that are fun, that provide short-term boosts in attendance, and most importantly they help keep everyone motivated.

This notion of motivation will bring us nicely to the fourth and last step… but first, any questions about low-hanging fruit?

And now on to step four….

Step two: Building infrastructure

Now let’s go on to the next step, building the infrastructure to support and sustain a growing program. (Remember that step two runs concurrently with step three, which is picking low-hanging fruit.)

If we’re going to adequately support growth of programs and ministries for young people, we’re going to need at least five essential elements. Let me list the five elements I think are essential:

(1) Money, from $1,000 up to $1,500 per kid. Money mostly goes to pay for staff time, and some goes to supplies.

(2) Volunteers, about 1 adult volunteer for every two kids. This includes both volunteers who have direct contact with kids, and those who do support work.

(3) Physical space, about 25 square feet per kid.

(4) A good enough program. We don’t need a supercalifragilisticexpealidocious program, you just need one that’s good enough.

(5) Pretty good plans in place to come up with more of the above when you begin to grow.

Now let’s look at each of these five essential elements.

First, money. If you have a year-round average attendance of 100 children and youth, I would expect you to hire a full-time experienced staff person. In the Bay Area, the total cost for salary and benefits for that full-time staff person will be about $100,000. That person will also need administrative support, in the form of approximately a half-time equivalent staff person, and a modest program budget of two to five thousand dollars. Thus, the total cost to the congregation will be on the order of $150,000, or $1,500 per kid. (Remember that your total enrollment will be around 200 kids, and your peak attendance will be probably come close to 200 on peak Sundays.) If your congregation is in an area that is less expensive than the Bay Area, you might get away with paying less per kid.

You can, of course, try to save money and pay your religious education staff person less. This has been the typical strategy of Unitarian Universalist congregations, and as a result the average tenure of a religious educator is on the order of two and a half years. I would suggest to you that turning over your religious education staff person every two and a half years is not wise. First, staff job searches are expensive, both in actual costs and in time lost due to getting a new staffer to become maximally effective. Second, every time you turn over a staff person, you tend to lose some families. So don’t be penny-wise and pound-foolish. Suck it up, and expect to pay $1,500 per kid.

And there’s another obvious point to be made here: If you grow your program, at some point you will have to increase staff time. It would be wise to have a funding plan in place before this happens.

(2) Second: one adult volunteer for every two kids. You should have four teachers or youth advisors in each teaching team, with about ten kids in each class or group. You have four on each team because you need to have two adults with every group of legal minors for safety reasons, and most adults have busy lives and cannot commit to being present each and every week. In addition to that, you will have other adults serving on the Religious Education Committee, and volunteering to provide program support in other ways.

Now that you know how many adult volunteers you need, you should begin to see that volunteer management is going to take up a great deal of your time. The quality of your volunteers is the key thing that determines the quality of your programs and ministries, so you will want to find the best people to serve, and when you find them you will want to keep them. To do this, remember the volunteer management cycle: recruit — train — support — recognize. And remember that the volunteer management cycle actually begins, not with recruitment, but with support. When your current volunteers feel adequately supported, not only will they perform better, but they are far more likely to sign up to volunteer again.

(3) Third: 25 square feet per kid. When you cram too many kids into a space that’s too small for them, you begin to get behavior problems, which results in lowered attendance. So you really don’t want anything less than 25 square feet per kid.

If you want to grow, it’s good to have a plan in place on how you can add physical space to accommodate growth. Here’s how you can add space without building a new building: Add another session of Sunday school. Use non-traditional spaces for classrooms, including minister and DRE offices. Clean up a room filled with junk to create a classroom. Rent spaces nearby.

The space you use for classes and youth groups does not have to be dedicated classroom or youth group space, but in my experience it does have to look like it belongs to the congregation. In every case that I know of where a congregation rents out rooms to an intensive user such as an outside school or a community group, such that the space looks like it belongs to the outside school or community group — in every such case, the congregation’s program for children and youth has been in long-term decline. The space has to look like it belongs to your congregation, and that your congregation welcomes kids.

(4) The fourth essential thing that you need is a program that’s good enough. It almost doesn’t matter what that program is, as long as it helps progress towards the four big goals we talked about earlier. I hear religious educators debating the relative merits of traditional Sunday school curriculum books, “Spirit Play,” the workshop rotation model, the junior church model, and so on. I don’t think it matters that much. You don’t need the newest, most spectacular, whiz-bang program; you just need one that’s good enough. If your current program is just good enough, keep it; don’t bother looking for a super-duper program.

Having said that, I do think that it is important that your program makes sense over time. That is, your program should account for what an individual kid is going to learn starting at birth and going through at least age 18. This is what we call vertical curriculum integration. At the most basic level, vertical curriculum integration makes sure you don’t repeat the same lesson or topic over and over; I still remember the child who said mournfully, “I don’t want to make dioramas of a Palestinian village; We did that last year, and the year before that, too!” At a more sophisticated level, vertical curriculum integration guides a child through a series of age-appropriate structured learning events so that the child gains a coherent body of knowledge over the course of their childhood and teen years. In short, the actual curriculum books or programs that you use are less important than the overall structure.

Most congregations lose 75% of their kids by the end of the Our Whole Lives program for grades 7-9, and/or by the end of the Coming of Age program. This suggests to me that the typical youth group program is not good enough. Many youth groups spend most of their time just hanging out with one another. While this kind of program works for a minority of teens (say 25% of them), I have heard back from the other 75% of teens who consider this to be a boring waste of their time. A decade ago, I watched as Jessica Rubenstein built the youth group of Winchester Unitarian Society in Massachusetts up to 80 teens — this in a congregation with an average attendance of about 200. In talking with her about what she did, she mentioned that in direct contradiction to the conventional idea of youth empowerment, where the youth run the program themselves, she mostly ran the program; and she said the youth preferred that. My congregation in Palo Alto is almost exactly the same size as Jessica’s congregation; we still run my youth group on the principle of youth empowerment, and we’re lucky to get ten youth showing up on any given week.

Do not underestimate the power of a good enough program. You do not need a stellar program, but you do need one that makes sense over time, and give s a sense of purpose.

(5) Fifth: a plan of what to do if you begin to grow. Where will you get more money? How will you retain and attract volunteers? How will you get more physical space? I have already talked about how you might answer all these questions.

Have you begun to notice how much of what I’m talking about relates to administration and management? I spent fifteen minutes talking about how to measure the size of your program. Now I have just spent another fifteen minutes talking about building up an administrative infrastructure that will take care of money, volunteers, physical space, a good enough program, and planning. Creating a transformative, growing program is not rocket science; in fact, conceptually it’s pretty simple. The hard part is having the patience to follow through on the administrative tasks year after year.

This will bring us to step three…. but first, any questions about building an adequate infrastructure?

And now on to step three….

Transform and grow your children and youth ministries and programs

Now I’d like to outline for you one possible process for transformational growth. This is a four step process. In step one, you develop a compelling vision and set measurable goals based on that vision. Then steps two and three run concurrently. In step two, you build the infrastructure to support a growing program. In step three, you pluck some low-hanging fruit to build enthusiasm among families, volunteers, and lay leaders. In step four, you have patience and hold on for at least five years.

Let’s look at each one of these steps.

Step one: Develop a compelling vision

I have served in eight different Unitarian Universalist congregations as a religious educator, an interim minister, and a parish minister. These congregation ranged in size from the 3,000 member Church of the Larger Fellowship, our online congregation, to a 25 member church. Eventually, I noticed that each of these congregations had approximately the same vision for its programs and ministries for children and youth. And finally I wrote down this shared vision in the form of four big learning goals. Here they are:

(1) We want children to have fun and feel they are part of a religious community.

(2) We want children to gain the basic religious literacy expected of informed citizens in our society.

(3) We want children to learn the skills associated with liberal religion, skills such as public speaking, singing, meditating, basic leadership skills, interpersonal skills, etc.

(4) We aim to prepare children to become Unitarian Universalist adults, should they choose to become Unitarian Universalists when they are old enough to make their own decisions. To this end, we help children to become sensitive, moral, and joyful people, people who have intellectual integrity and spiritual insight.

I wrote down these four goals, and began presenting it to parents and guardians of children and youth. They immediately understood these goals, and more importantly they liked them. These goals set forth what they want for their children: to have a supportive place to grow up; to learn some basic religious facts; to gain some basic skills; and to grow up to become good human beings, the kind of good human being we like to imagine Unitarian Universalists are.

Lay leaders and volunteers also like these goals, not only because that’s what they want for our Unitarian Universalist kids, but also because these goals are specific and measurable. Let me take a moment to show you how each goal can be measured.

The first goal, having fun and being part of a religious community, is easy to measure: you track attendance as a percentage of total enrollment from September through May; if your average attendance is 50%, parents are probably dragging their kids to your programs; if you’re at 70%, kids are having fun and they are the ones demanding to go to your programs so they can see their friends and have fun. When you tell volunteers that you are measuring the success of the program by this means, they are more likely to allow time for fun and games and they will incorporate time for kids to talk about their lives; and I have found this means that not only do volunteers start having more fun, but you better meet children’s pastoral need to talk about their lives and have a caring adult pay attention to them. Finally, when you tell your lay leaders that having fun and building community is your first goal, because if kids don’t show up you can’t teach them anything, they understand it immediately, and offer total support.

The second goal, gaining the basic religious literacy expected in our society, is more difficult to measure. We stopped doing assessment in Sunday school many decades ago, and these days we rarely take the time to develop appropriate assessment instruments. However, in the absence of adequate assessment instruments, I have substituted a curriculum grid that outlines which topics we expect a child to go through over the course of their Sunday school career, up through the coming of Age program. It’s a sort of checklist of what we’re going to teach kids; it’s not perfect, but it’s adequate.

The third goal, learning the skills associated with liberal religion, things such as public speaking, singing, meditation, basic leadership skills, interpersonal skills, etc., gets measured about the same way that the goal of religious literacy gets measured. However, these skills can get addressed outside of Sunday school time. For example, assuming your kids are in the first fifteen minutes of every Sunday service, you can teach singing skills by making sure the first hymn comes from a small group of half a dozen hymns and songs that kids will learn by singing them over and over again, week after week. Teenagers can be recruited to serve on committees, with appropriate mentoring. Specific skills can also be incorporated into specific programs: decision-making skills are part of the Our Whole Lives program for grades 7-9; public speaking is part of the Coming of Age program; and so on.

The fourth goal, aiming to prepare kids to become Unitarian Universalist adults, can be measured at the completion of the Coming of Age program. You ask Coming of Age graduates if they want to become pledging members of your congregation, and expect about 50% to sign the book. Then you track participation of high school aged teens in congregational life until graduation, aiming for a 40% rate of continued participation. It is worth noting that right now we lose something like 85% of the people who grew up as Unitarian Universalists; retaining 40% of our kids into adulthood is actually an ambitious goal.

It’s worth noting here that if you set these as your four big educational goals, and if you’re focused on growing your program, you will probably have to let go of some cherished and beloved programs. For example, even though I have been very active in district and continental youth ministry since 1995, I no longer am willing to put time and energy into our district’s Coming of Age and youth programs, even though I miss district youth ministry a lot. First, I have found that district programs attract less than 25% of all our congregation’s youth. Second, my experience has been that district programming rarely meets the second and third of our big goals. Third, I’ve never seen district youth programs result in growth; in fact, it’s usually the opposite. Even though I’ve been deeply committed to district and continental youth ministry since 1995, growth takes a lot of time and energy and I can no longer justify putting time and energy into programs that don’t produce the results I say I want. I bring this up as just one example of how adopting a compelling vision can force you to give up cherished programs and ministries; there are many, many others.

On the other hand, when you present these four big goals as your vision for what kids will get out of your program, everyone — including the kids — responds positively. Kids are happy, even though they may complain, because they feel a sense of purpose, and because they like to know when they’ve achieved mastery of something. Parents/guardians are happy, because they know what they’re going to get. And volunteers and lay leaders are happy because they feel a strong sense of purpose.

Any questions about the compelling vision?

On to the next step….

Welcome!

We’re going to talk about transforming and growing your programs and ministries for children and youth. And my emphasis is going to be on growth. I believe that there are many families who would love to have their children participate in our programs and ministries for young people, and wee need to make room for them in our congregations. Furthermore, research by the Search Institute shows that regular participation by youth in a religious congregation correlates with a decrease in risky behaviors such as substance abuse; therefore, by having more kids participating regularly in our congregations, we are literally saving lives.

If this is not the workshop you were expecting, feel free to leave now or at any time without embarrassment. I only want you to be here if you want to be here.

And if you want to ask questions, please write them down (legibly). I am going to post the entire presentation online, and I want to include your questions online. I will stop periodically during this workshop to take your questions.

How to measure growth

If you really want to grow your programs and ministries for children and youth, the first thing you have to do is figure out how you’re going to measure growth. More often than not, you get exactly the kind of growth you measure for. This is so important that we’re going to take fifteen minutes right now to go over this.

Perhaps the most common way to measure the size of a religious education program is to count the number of children and youth for whom you have signed registration forms — after all, this is the number the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) asks congregations to report each year. The strength of this measure of program size is that it is well-defined: you gather all the paper registration forms and count up the number of names on them. However, this measure of program size has two big weaknesses. First, if you’re aggressive at getting everyone who walks in the door with kids to fill out a registration form, you can drive your numbers up very quickly, but you will not be accurately measuring the number of kids who actually show up at your program on a regular basis. Second, if you’re not very aggressive at getting families to fill out registration forms, there are always a significant percentage of families (sometimes as high as 30-50%) who just never fill out the form. In short, in my experience the number of registered children and youth usually is not a good measure of the actual number of warm bodies in your classrooms.

The next most common way to measure the size of a religious education program is to count the number of children and youth who are physically present on every Sunday of the year, and then to calculate the average Sunday attendance. Most of us keep good attendance records, because we are dealing with legal minors, so usually it is a simple matter to calculate average annual weekly attendance. Furthermore, the UUA is now requiring annual attendance figures, so most of us are keeping records on attendance anyway. However, this measure of program size also has its weaknesses. First, when you have intergenerational services, it’s difficult to count the number of children and youth present, and the children and youth are simply counted as part of the adult attendance. Second, there are often non-traditional programs that perhaps do not take place on Sunday morning (e.g., OWL, Coming of Age, Children’s Choir, etc.), but which attract children and youth who do not attend other programs, and it is never entirely clear whether those children and youth should be included in the total attendance or not. Finally, volunteers sometimes forget to take attendance, or aren’t accurate in their attendance taking. While average attendance provides a more accurate measure of the size of a religious education program, the margin of error might be as large as five to ten percent.

A third measure of program size which I have found useful is what I call enrollment. I define enrollment as follows: children are enrolled in the religious education program if (a) their parents/guardians have filled out and signed a registration form; and/or (b) if they have attended three or more times in the previous six to eight months; and children or youth who have not attended at all in the last six to eight months are taken off the enrollment list if no new registration form has been submitted. I find enrollment helps me to correct some of the problems inherent in registration numbers. I calculate enrollment twice annually: once in late August, and once in late December. In August, enrollment allows me to plan for the maximum expected attendance on any given week, an important consideration when recruiting volunteers and allocating rooms. In December, enrollment is the number which I report to the UUA as total registration. Looking at enrollment lists twice a year also allows me to determine which families have drifted away, and what new families have arrived. However, enrollment numbers are more fictional than actual average attendance.

Rather than using just one measure of program size, I think it is wise to use at least two measures of program size together. I like to look at enrollment and average attendance. And I look at these numbers as dynamic, not static; that is, they are constantly changing over time, which means I can look at trends. Ideally, I would collect enrollment and attendance data for at least twenty-five years so I could get a picture of the long-term trends in a given congregation. I also look at the relation between enrollment and attendance figures: if attendance is less than 50% of enrollment then I suspect that the enrollment numbers were padded, or that the program was lousy; if attendance is greater than 70% of enrollment, then I suspect the attendance figures were padded or the program was unbelievably good.

I further break down these two big numbers into more detailed numbers. Perhaps most importantly, I break down enrollment into age groups. This allows me to see if we start losing kids at a certain age. Most often, you’ll see a slight drop off in enrollment beginning at about grade 5; then there’s typically a sharp drop off in grades 7 and 8, because we lose about half our UU kids in middle school. Next in importance, I break down attendance into monthly averages, and I graph that to see when we typically have high and low attendance. I also break down enrollment into number of families, and I look at the number of families who pledge or make substantial financial contributions.

As you can see, measuring the size of a program is not a simple matter. And what you measure really makes a difference when you are striving for growth. Let me give you two examples:

In the first example, let’s say that you have decided to measure growth solely by attendance. I once served as a religious educator in a congregation back east where one of my predecessors did precisely this: this person set a goal of growing the program, and measured growth by signed registration forms. This staff person was notorious for “swooping down on newcomers” the moment they walked into the building, and basically forcing them to sign a registration form. On the basis of increased registration numbers, this staff person successfully advocated for a substantial increase in hours and compensation. But when I tracked down attendance records, I discovered that attendance was basically flat throughout this person’s tenure. So by this other measure, the program had not grown at all.

In the second example, let’s look at the congregation I’m currently serving. In 2009, the Board hired a consultant who showed us how to measure the size of the congregation by average attendance, and we subsequently determined that we would aim to increase the average attendance of Sunday morning programs. In 2011, the Sunday morning religious education programs achieved the phenomenal growth rate of 21% over the previous year, as measured by attendance. However, the Board pointed out that there was no increase in people who signed the membership book, adult attendance had not increased, and furthermore a closer look at the numbers revealed that most of the average increase came from a very successful summer program, whereas attendance in winter months was essentially flat.

At the same time, pledge income increased 15% in the 2011 canvass over the previous year, so perhaps the growth wasn’t entirely fictional; increased attendance can be linked to increased satisfaction, which can in turn be linked to increased pledging. (Parenthetical note: pledges increased once again in the 2012 canvass, and several families with children are in the top quintile of givers.) But on the other hand, while average annual religious education attendance increased by 21%, the total average annual Sunday morning attendance did not increase; the increase in religious education attendance turned out to be linked to a slight decrease in adult attendance. Unfortunately, due to defects in our congregational database, we were unable to determine if our enrollment was up or not; but enrollment was probably flat.

So while we had originally agreed upon average attendance as the way to measure growth, in the end this measure did not prove satisfactory to key stakeholders. The final consensus was that the RE program grew in attendance by about 5% in 2011 (but not in certified members); grew significantly in satisfaction as indicated on evaluations; and grew in terms of pledges. We got the growth we measured for, but we didn’t get the growth we were really hoping for.

It becomes clear that if your goal is to grow your program, you have to be careful what you measure, and how you measure it.

I believe the best way to measure the size and growth of a religious education program is by looking at three numbers simultaneously: enrollment, attendance, and financial contributions. If your enrollment is going up year by year; if your average attendance is increasing in absolute numbers and is either increasing or remaining constant considered as a percentage of enrollment; if pledge income from families is increasing both in absolute numbers and increasing as fast as or faster than inflation — then you can be sure you are growing.

Now: if your enrollment is up but neither of the other numbers is up, then most probably your program is not growing, you are merely being aggressive about getting newcomers to sign registration forms. Or if your attendance is up but enrollment is not, then probably satisfaction is increasing, and demands on volunteer and staff time are increasing, but the consensus among congregational leaders will be that you’re not growing. Or if your pledge income is up, but enrollment and attendance are not up, then maybe you just had really lousy giving in previous years — or maybe you just have really generous people in your congregation, which is a really nice thing to have, but it’s not growth the way most of us think about growth.

Therefore, I say unto you: measure enrollment, average attendance, and pledge income. When they are all going up, then you’re growing.

One final note about measuring growth: I have rarely found that the main congregational database can track the kind of information I need to measure growth. Pretty much the only way I have been able to get accurate information is to track attendance and enrollment on spreadsheets that I maintain on my own computer.

Any questions about how to measure growth?

On to the next section….