From Dave Ferguson’s blog:
In the movie Moneyball, Brad Pitt plays the part of the Oakland A’s General Manager Billy Beane. While most of the baseball old timers and scouts had a set of stats they used to look for young prospects, Billy Beane understood that the only stat that mattered was runs scored. Through statistical analysis he changed the game of baseball forever and was credited with indirectly bringing a championship to the Boston Red Sox for the first time in 85 years.
In light of this move, Dave then asks a great question:
If making disciples is what matters most; how do you keep track of disciple-making? How does a church know if they are doing a good job at making disciples?
He has invited comments at his blog and I added my two cents:
First off, great question! I suspect that in the comments we will hear a lot about baptisms, attendance, professions of faith, small group attendance, and the number of people serving. These are good things to track. However, I feel like these are analogous to the standardized stats in baseball (AVG, HR, RBI). If you don’t know baseball, these are the stats that “old school” baseball teams used to track success. They are good to measure, but often don’t tell the whole story. The failure I see in churches when using stats to measure success is that all the things measured are WITHIN the church (see my list above). We measure those because they are easy to measure and can put numbers to those things. It’s much harder to measure things outside the church. For example, what if someone at your church is engaging with their neighbor trying to lead him/her to Christ. They are doing evangelism but you probably don’t know about it and that can’t be quantified (or at least it’s difficult to quantify it).
I say all of this because I think this is the difficulty in using stats–you don’t always know them nor are they quantifiable. It would be like trying to evaluate a baseball player but you don’t know what he did in 100 of his at-bats. You are only aware of 50 of his at-bats.
These are good questions to wrestle with but often times don’t have great answers. These questions are also very applicable to your sports ministry. First off, what is success for your sports ministry? What stats are you using to determine your effectiveness? What challenges do you have in measuring your success? Are there any stats or other ways to measure your effectiveness?
It was out of these questions that we created our Going for the Gold Resource. Watch the video and download the scorecard*. We believe this will help you in your sports ministry measure your effectiveness.
*If you’re not a CSO Network member, you can view/download these resources for free by filling out this form.