Sorry… I meant the guy who played Jesus’, in the Passion of Christ, second visit to CCV. Jim Caviezel, spoke for the second time at CCV tonight (and tomorrow if you in town). Jim is an interesting guy who has a lot of fascinating stories. As a guest speaker he can be a bit hard to track with as he likes to jump from one story to another, but in both of his appearances he has really inspired me. He really exudes passion for taking a stand for what is right.

One quote he left us with tonight is “freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.” I know this isn’t an original quote, but he’s delivery and passion for it hit home and resinates with the crossroad we currently stand as a country.

Thanks Jim for the encouragement and role model you are.

Nothing is more important than the safety of our children, right? Consider then checking your membership data against your states sex offender database. Even if you require background checks for volunteers who serve around children, you want to compare everyone in your database. It’s cheap (the AZ database is only $25) and fairly easy to do with some minor tech skills.

So what do you do with the results? We flag the records in Arena (set a note that displays largely at the top of the record), add a photo to Arena (if one already exists we leave it otherwise we add their ‘mugshot’) and ensure our security team is aware of their presence.

These individuals are as welcome as any other person in our church, God loves them as much as me. But, the safety of our children demand that we take extra precautions.

For information on getting the database for your state see the Department of Justice website. Arizona churches see the DPS website.

Update: A few people have asked for tips on doing the compare. Here’s what we did. We started by importing the file into a SQL table and then looked for matches on last name, zip code and the first letter of the first name. This produces some false positives, but we quickly ruled those out but looking at their full first name and addresses.

I mentioned in my previous post on metrics that that the church is the last organization type to develop standardized metrics. Maybe, together, we can change that. eRA is the start of what I hope will be a good standardized metric… we’ll see…

eRA stands for ‘estimated Regular Attender’. Today we use the term ‘regular attender’ rather loosely. We can’t really define when one becomes a regular attendee, and even if we do we don’t define when one stops being one. It’s also hard to measure when exactly someone has met these criteria. God knows the exact number of regular attenders in our church, but for the most part we’re left guessing.

David and I came up with the concept of an ‘estimated Regular Attender’. It’s a model that helps to estimate the number of regular attendees a church has using data that is commonly available, attendance and giving. The key word here is estimate… if you get hung up on the exceptions to the rule you’ll miss the point. The point of this metric is not be be an exact count, that’s not possible, at least in a church larger than 1,000. The point is to create a estimation of the number of regular attenders that you can consistently use over time to see trends. We’ve played with the criteria quite a bit and feel like we have a fairly solid model. We’d love your feedback though as we’re not above being wrong

So… how does one become an eRA? Here’s the criteria:

• Has given 3 or more times and has given in the last 6 weeks
• OR Has attended at least 8 out of the last 16 weeks

Notes:

1. Notice that the criteria is OR… giving or attendance
2. We count eRAs as families not individuals
3. We use attendance data from birth to 8th grade. We feel that Jr High and High School students are fairly independent and often attend church in patterns different than their parents

Ok, we see how to become an eRA how about the exit path? When building the model we quickly found that there needs to be a different exit criteria than the entrance. Otherwise you get a teetering effect where a family goes in and out weekly as they balance on the edge of the criteria. So here’s the exit criteria:

• Hasn’t given in the last 8 weeks
• AND Hasn’t attended in the last 4 weeks
• AND Attended less than 8 of the last 16 weeks

Notes:

• Notice that the criteria here is AND… they must meet all of the criteria to stop becoming an eRA.

Using this module there’s a few things you can track… the obvious first metric is the number of eRAs overtime.

You can also measure eRA win and loss over time. This is important as it breaks out growth from loss and allows you to measure your back door. Even if you want the back door open you’d like to know how wide it is.

(top line is adds, bottom line is losses)

An interesting point arose as we looked at the resulting data. Review the eRA entrance criteria again… and now the exit criteria. Now add a person’s name to it… Joe attends 8 out of the last 16 weeks THEN misses 8 out of the last 16 weeks AND hasn’t shown up in 4 weeks AND hasn’t given in at least 8 weeks. Does that set off an alarm in your head… what happened to Joe!? Shouldn’t that fact generate a phone call?

Now some would say that a back door is a good thing… and that may be true. But, I would contend that it matters how someone leaves the back door. Do they leave grumbling about the use of a fog machine during worship? OK there’s another Bible teaching church down the road… But perhaps they are they bleeding out the back door from a failed marriage, an illness, or a change in faith? I would say a call is warranted to at least confirm which case it is.

“Suppose one of you has a hundred sheep and loses one of them. Does he not leave the ninety-nine in the open country and go after the lost sheep until he finds it?” Luke 15:4

There’s so much more to say about these metrics, but hey this is a blog post… but there it is in a nutshell… what are your thoughts? Useful…? Flawed…?

Note: Arena customers: be sure to see David’s blog on some stored procedures that help you generate these metrics.

As I mentioned in our previous post, David and I have been working on some new metrics. Our process has been to ask a question (like ‘How Often Do Our Peope Attend?’), find data to try to answer it, which usually brings up additional questions, which causes us to dig deeper.

The first question we started with was “How often do our attendees come?” We did some looking at our check-in data and created the chart below. It takes a look at the last 16 weeks of data (only for birth through 8th grade) and shows how many times a person missed church.

Weeks Missed Out of 16

So we can see that the average person doesn’t come very often, in fact missing 3 out of 4 weeks. Only 21% of people show up every other week or better. This was just a first stab though… we know through some other data that we get an enormous amount of first-time visitors. Could these be skewing the data? Let’s see.

I recently presented on some new ideas regarding metrics at the RefreshCache conference at Central Christian Church. Over the course of the last few weeks David and I have been working one some new ways of looking at church metrics. Before I dive into that let me discuss how our current metrics fail us…

First of all I think that the church is the only type of organization that doesn’t have a set of established standardized metrics (think cycle time, defects per million, etc etc in manufacturing). We hope to bring some light to this topic and hopefully provide some strawman metrics that can be discussed in a larger community. But back to our current metrics…

Our two most common measures today are:

• Giving
• Attendance Objects in Seats

A key point above is that what we call attendance really isn’t attendance, at least not at most churches over 1,000. Head counts are not attendance. Attendance assumes you know who the person is. Head counts measure objects in seats. I mean really… picture the usher counting in the back of the room… it’s a pretty safe bet that in most churches this cardboard cutout of Chewy, if left too near a seat, would be counted…. and if left there for the entire weekend would be counted more than once. “1…2…3…4…..(kinda hairy…but…)5….”

Our metrics today are really a measure of quantity (total giving, total attendance… err objects in seats) vs quality (the Edmiston’s are here again for the 8th time in 10 weeks, they’re giving shows that they trust God with their finances). Don’t you think God’s more concerned about the second metric? The problem is that to date these types of metrics are difficult to produce. Models haven’t been devised on how to measure the quality of ministry vs the quantity of it.

So… that’s a bit of a bummer… I’m not one to talk about problems without suggesting possible solutions. I’ll post on those this weekend.

Check out this cool history of religions from the Maps of War website.

We’re embarking in a new project to define a set of metrics that will help us determine what’s changing in our church.  One of the things that’s pretty evident is that you can’t see trends if you look at the whole enchilada. Can’t see trends in membership if you look at everyone at the same time.  Can’t see changes in giving patterns if you measure all gifts.

Take two examples…

1. Say you look at small group attendance over time.  You notice that attendance starts going down mid-semester.  What’s wrong?  Is it serious?  Who’s leaving?  Would you be more worried if your church leaders stop showing up or those who aren’t as committed.  Maybe ‘more worried’ is the wrong phrase… would ‘react differently’ if your leaders start dropping out?  Yes, they’re probably leaving for a different reason than if a new christian leaves.
2. Or, say your interested in why giving is up (or down).  If you look at the average gift overtime you’ll often be misled (or at least disappointed) by what you see.  Why?  Because the large gifts of the top givers and small gifts of the small givers hide the patterns that are occurring.

My initial thought we should describe each member/attendee in the church with a classification.  Then look at the metrics within each classification.  We could also help move people to the next level if we know where they are in their journey.  An initial stab at the categories are below.  I played off of Richard Reising’s baseball approach from Church Marketing 101

1. Coaches – the top level.  We’d probably only have 100-150 of these in our church of 11,000.  These folks are the strongest leaders of the church assigned to roles such as neighborhood leaders, ministry leader.  Like unpaid staff.  To reach this someone on staff would have to sponsor you that you really are (and remain) a top level leader.
2. Captains – leaders.  These are the general leaders of the church.  Roles like small groups leaders, usher leaders, etc.  We’d probably have 300-400 of these.
3. Players – These are folks that are actively involved in the ministry of CCV.  They attend small groups and serve.  The are committed the the vision and mission.
4. Lower Deck – These are attendees who are regular attendee’s / givers who are not actively involved.  Perhaps they have been to our Class 100 and been baptized but have not joined those on the field.
5. Upper Deck – Folks who have just started CCV.  They’re in the seats but have not yet committed to the church.
6. Prospects – Those in the database but who don’t attend CCV.  They ‘participate’ in other activities such as Aerobics, youth sports, etc.  These are some of our outreach prospects.

These are just initial thoughts… comments?