This was an interesting question to ask. I do think you might assume that leaders can pay attention to the local or the institutional, but I think someone who is good at guiding a diverse community on a collective mission is also someone who might be able to help a diverse institution work through a collective mission.
As I was reading I thought "there has to be another way to measure the effectiveness of a pastor" especially because numbers in the present day are often a reflection of broader trends of a declining church rather than an indictment on a particular leader. I think membership numbers might be the only thing that we can measure though, so I appreciate seeing some of that laid out.
Another great analysis, Kent, thanks for this. One other mediating factor is that delegation practices vary from classis to classis. In my classis for example, one pastor delegate is elected and the other is on a multi-year rotating list. In that sense some of the delegates this year are not so much a response to the last few Synods as they are the "luck of the draw" (hand of providence? We'll see)
There are a few delegates from churches that can barely keep the lights on, have fewer than 45 regular attenders/members and should be considered emerging/not organized churches and thus not able to have office bearers be delegated to classis/ synod. Could one ask why they even stay open and could we also infer that because they have "power" in the greater body they remain open? Is this a failure of the classis leadership to address churches in decline with oversight and encouragement and also to urge the pastors of such churches to spend more time locally than denominationally? Denominational acumen does not always make an effective leader but an effective leader could also be a good pastor and a good denominational leader..
CRCNA Church Order Supplement, Article 38-d
If a church has diminished to fewer than forty-five active confessing
members or shows that it lacks a sufficient number of members who can
provide leadership or it can no longer meet its financial obligations or
there is no prospect of continued growth, then a classis should consider
that these are sufficient indicators for it to begin discussing with such a
congregation whether it is still appropriate for it to retain organized status.
Contrary to Jeff, I would offer that this is a very poor analysis. No, raw numbers and numerical trends are not reliable or worthy measurements of pastoral ministry.
And no, it is not worth asking if pastors from churches with declining membership should be delegated to synod. That's frankly a superficial and insulting question to ask.
You would have done well to listen to the little voice that prompted you to write your concluding "4 ways..." and leave it at that.
I get your hesitancy and objection around trying to measure the effectiveness of pastoral ministry, because some/most of it just can’t be measured. To be honest, I wrote this post a couple weeks ago and almost deleted it, probably for some of the same reasons you object to it. (It's also why I included objections to my own post at the bottom.)
I decided to post it for three reasons:
1. Even though metrics around this are imprecise, they are imprecise equally and randomly. Though that makes it impossible to describe a single person’s work or effectiveness, it *does* make it possible to describe a group’s work or effectiveness and compare this effectiveness over time. The law of large numbers dictates that this be true.
2. There’s a long history of discomfort in measuring certain things, but usually this concern prevents what turns out to be a useful or beneficial outcome. The best example of this is the hesitancy of people to buy life insurance, because it felt taboo to put a number on a human life. But now most people have life insurance, and most people agree it’s a good thing to have.
3. The general tone of discourse in the CRC about almost everything in the past few years has gotten sharply ideological. The answer I've heard given for the question I tried to answer in this post has been based on gut feel or bias. As far as I know, nobody has tried to just count—and see what turned up. Doing so doesn't make up a reality. It helps clarify it, understand it, or dispel it. And even if it turns out to be wrong or unhelpful, that's itself is a useful piece of information.
Your #1 is faulty and your #2 and #3 are predicated upon #1 being true.
Numbers and numerical trends are not reliable indicators of competent/faithful/desirable pastoral practice or church leadership. By your metric we should desire leaders like Mark Driscoll, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Joel Osteen for synod while eschewing the likes of Elijah and Jeremiah.
In the current CRC situation, it is easily possible that declining congregational numbers are a direct result of faithful and competent pastoral practice or church leadership.
Beyond that, pastors, elders, and deacons are not rightly judged by cultural and demographic patterns and pressures beyond their control. Your analysis is superficial in that it correlates numerical decline with competence when you have established no sound reason to do so.
If a measurement is imprecise—as trying to measure pastoral effectiveness certainly is, by definition—but the errors in measurement are distributed and random, then you can’t measure any single person or any single church’s work or effectiveness. Noise > Signal.
But when these same imprecise measurements are aggregated, the random errors/unmeasurable components cancel each other out. Signal emerges from noise. So a group measurement converges toward something that’s less imprecise and more accurate. It it perfect? Nope. But definitely better, and at minimum, useful.
Because of this—i.e. because a group average is less imprecise and more representative of the thing being measured in aggregate, you can compare group effectiveness over time—between 2014 and 2024. This only works if the measurement at any point in time is equally imprecise, and I would argue that it is. It’s not like we couldn’t measure pastoral effectiveness in 2014 and figured out how to do it in 2024, or vice versa. And it's not like the Yearbook in 2024 is any more or less accurate than the Yearbook in 2014.
This is why it’s possible to claim that a particular church that is smaller in 2024 than 2014 might be healthier, or that a denomination that is larger in 2024 than 2014 might be healthier—even though those two things seem like they are opposite.
There are all kinds of phenomena like pastoral effectiveness that can’t be measured, but when viewed in aggregate, it’s possible to understand something about them within groups and over long periods of time. If a bunch of churches are shrinking and a subset within that bunch are shrinking much less fast, we shouldn't dismiss this as random noise. This is meaningful information that should prompt us to ask why there's a difference, especially when matters regarding membership decline regularly appear on Synod's agenda.
It's not Stats 101 because stats does not make value judgements, stats just report numbers. In your #1 you made value judgements or arrived at conclusions that the numbers do not establish. "Effectiveness" is a value judgement. Your numbers say absolutely nothing about effectiveness - they are mere numbers. You have made your own value judgements based on those numbers or trends, but you have not established that those value judgements are warranted. Again, yours is a Stats+ analysis, and a faulty one.
Yes, this--what I wrote previously--*is* stats 101: "Even though metrics around this are imprecise, they are imprecise equally and randomly. Though that makes it impossible to describe a single person’s work or effectiveness, it *does* make it possible to describe a group’s work or effectiveness and compare this effectiveness over time." I explained why above.
And now, a meta-comment.
Do you have constructive, persuasive feedback on this? In my original post, I tried to answer, with some hesitancy, a question I had. I'm not 100% confident in my answer, and I acknowledged in my original post some objections to it, and you have confirmed this with your comments. But you've chosen a death-by-thousand-paper-cuts approach. We can keep doing this—you can keep responding to me, and I'll keep responding to you—but frankly it's a huge waste of my time if you're not going to go back to my original question, which is ultimately what I'm curious about and what I really care about.
Writing this post caused me to change my mind, which should tell you that I'm the kind of person who will change my mind if you give me a good argument. I'm receptive. I'd just prefer that you take a positive approach to the problem.
(I won't have time to respond again until this weekend, so if I don't reply, it's not because I'm ignoring you.)
Sorry to waste your time in conversation, Kent. I have not chosen a death-by-thousand-papercuts approach. I have directly countered a key element of your analysis.
"You are one person" - Stats
"You are one bad person" - Not stats
You are free to editorialize, but your editorializing is not stats - it's editorializing. Stable or growing numbers cannot be conflated with health and competence, which you have done with no support. I have consistently challenged that directly since my first comment and you have consistently ignored it. We may be at an impasse, it seems.
This was an interesting question to ask. I do think you might assume that leaders can pay attention to the local or the institutional, but I think someone who is good at guiding a diverse community on a collective mission is also someone who might be able to help a diverse institution work through a collective mission.
As I was reading I thought "there has to be another way to measure the effectiveness of a pastor" especially because numbers in the present day are often a reflection of broader trends of a declining church rather than an indictment on a particular leader. I think membership numbers might be the only thing that we can measure though, so I appreciate seeing some of that laid out.
Another great analysis, Kent, thanks for this. One other mediating factor is that delegation practices vary from classis to classis. In my classis for example, one pastor delegate is elected and the other is on a multi-year rotating list. In that sense some of the delegates this year are not so much a response to the last few Synods as they are the "luck of the draw" (hand of providence? We'll see)
There are a few delegates from churches that can barely keep the lights on, have fewer than 45 regular attenders/members and should be considered emerging/not organized churches and thus not able to have office bearers be delegated to classis/ synod. Could one ask why they even stay open and could we also infer that because they have "power" in the greater body they remain open? Is this a failure of the classis leadership to address churches in decline with oversight and encouragement and also to urge the pastors of such churches to spend more time locally than denominationally? Denominational acumen does not always make an effective leader but an effective leader could also be a good pastor and a good denominational leader..
CRCNA Church Order Supplement, Article 38-d
If a church has diminished to fewer than forty-five active confessing
members or shows that it lacks a sufficient number of members who can
provide leadership or it can no longer meet its financial obligations or
there is no prospect of continued growth, then a classis should consider
that these are sufficient indicators for it to begin discussing with such a
congregation whether it is still appropriate for it to retain organized status.
(Acts of Synod 2005, p. 763)
Contrary to Jeff, I would offer that this is a very poor analysis. No, raw numbers and numerical trends are not reliable or worthy measurements of pastoral ministry.
And no, it is not worth asking if pastors from churches with declining membership should be delegated to synod. That's frankly a superficial and insulting question to ask.
You would have done well to listen to the little voice that prompted you to write your concluding "4 ways..." and leave it at that.
I get your hesitancy and objection around trying to measure the effectiveness of pastoral ministry, because some/most of it just can’t be measured. To be honest, I wrote this post a couple weeks ago and almost deleted it, probably for some of the same reasons you object to it. (It's also why I included objections to my own post at the bottom.)
I decided to post it for three reasons:
1. Even though metrics around this are imprecise, they are imprecise equally and randomly. Though that makes it impossible to describe a single person’s work or effectiveness, it *does* make it possible to describe a group’s work or effectiveness and compare this effectiveness over time. The law of large numbers dictates that this be true.
2. There’s a long history of discomfort in measuring certain things, but usually this concern prevents what turns out to be a useful or beneficial outcome. The best example of this is the hesitancy of people to buy life insurance, because it felt taboo to put a number on a human life. But now most people have life insurance, and most people agree it’s a good thing to have.
3. The general tone of discourse in the CRC about almost everything in the past few years has gotten sharply ideological. The answer I've heard given for the question I tried to answer in this post has been based on gut feel or bias. As far as I know, nobody has tried to just count—and see what turned up. Doing so doesn't make up a reality. It helps clarify it, understand it, or dispel it. And even if it turns out to be wrong or unhelpful, that's itself is a useful piece of information.
Your #1 is faulty and your #2 and #3 are predicated upon #1 being true.
Numbers and numerical trends are not reliable indicators of competent/faithful/desirable pastoral practice or church leadership. By your metric we should desire leaders like Mark Driscoll, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn, and Joel Osteen for synod while eschewing the likes of Elijah and Jeremiah.
In the current CRC situation, it is easily possible that declining congregational numbers are a direct result of faithful and competent pastoral practice or church leadership.
Beyond that, pastors, elders, and deacons are not rightly judged by cultural and demographic patterns and pressures beyond their control. Your analysis is superficial in that it correlates numerical decline with competence when you have established no sound reason to do so.
#1 isn’t faulty. It’s Stats 101.
If a measurement is imprecise—as trying to measure pastoral effectiveness certainly is, by definition—but the errors in measurement are distributed and random, then you can’t measure any single person or any single church’s work or effectiveness. Noise > Signal.
But when these same imprecise measurements are aggregated, the random errors/unmeasurable components cancel each other out. Signal emerges from noise. So a group measurement converges toward something that’s less imprecise and more accurate. It it perfect? Nope. But definitely better, and at minimum, useful.
Because of this—i.e. because a group average is less imprecise and more representative of the thing being measured in aggregate, you can compare group effectiveness over time—between 2014 and 2024. This only works if the measurement at any point in time is equally imprecise, and I would argue that it is. It’s not like we couldn’t measure pastoral effectiveness in 2014 and figured out how to do it in 2024, or vice versa. And it's not like the Yearbook in 2024 is any more or less accurate than the Yearbook in 2014.
This is why it’s possible to claim that a particular church that is smaller in 2024 than 2014 might be healthier, or that a denomination that is larger in 2024 than 2014 might be healthier—even though those two things seem like they are opposite.
There are all kinds of phenomena like pastoral effectiveness that can’t be measured, but when viewed in aggregate, it’s possible to understand something about them within groups and over long periods of time. If a bunch of churches are shrinking and a subset within that bunch are shrinking much less fast, we shouldn't dismiss this as random noise. This is meaningful information that should prompt us to ask why there's a difference, especially when matters regarding membership decline regularly appear on Synod's agenda.
It's not Stats 101 because stats does not make value judgements, stats just report numbers. In your #1 you made value judgements or arrived at conclusions that the numbers do not establish. "Effectiveness" is a value judgement. Your numbers say absolutely nothing about effectiveness - they are mere numbers. You have made your own value judgements based on those numbers or trends, but you have not established that those value judgements are warranted. Again, yours is a Stats+ analysis, and a faulty one.
Eric,
Yes, this--what I wrote previously--*is* stats 101: "Even though metrics around this are imprecise, they are imprecise equally and randomly. Though that makes it impossible to describe a single person’s work or effectiveness, it *does* make it possible to describe a group’s work or effectiveness and compare this effectiveness over time." I explained why above.
And now, a meta-comment.
Do you have constructive, persuasive feedback on this? In my original post, I tried to answer, with some hesitancy, a question I had. I'm not 100% confident in my answer, and I acknowledged in my original post some objections to it, and you have confirmed this with your comments. But you've chosen a death-by-thousand-paper-cuts approach. We can keep doing this—you can keep responding to me, and I'll keep responding to you—but frankly it's a huge waste of my time if you're not going to go back to my original question, which is ultimately what I'm curious about and what I really care about.
Writing this post caused me to change my mind, which should tell you that I'm the kind of person who will change my mind if you give me a good argument. I'm receptive. I'd just prefer that you take a positive approach to the problem.
(I won't have time to respond again until this weekend, so if I don't reply, it's not because I'm ignoring you.)
Sorry to waste your time in conversation, Kent. I have not chosen a death-by-thousand-papercuts approach. I have directly countered a key element of your analysis.
"You are one person" - Stats
"You are one bad person" - Not stats
You are free to editorialize, but your editorializing is not stats - it's editorializing. Stable or growing numbers cannot be conflated with health and competence, which you have done with no support. I have consistently challenged that directly since my first comment and you have consistently ignored it. We may be at an impasse, it seems.