[0:00]
G'day and welcome to the one thing. We're going to take a little bit of a break over summer and we'll be back mid-January. In the meantime, we thought we would play some of the episodes that you thought were the best. Enjoy.

[0:30]
We're going to take a look at the one thing that's brought to you by Reach Australia. Our vision is to see thousands of healthy, healthy, healthy, I'm a Queenslander! Healthy, evangelistic and multiplying churches across Australia. Now, just this week that we've had, we've had one of our team development programs running up in Sydney. Three churches in north of Sydney have gathered their teams for four days during the day to think about how it is that they have a church become healthy, evangelistic and multiplying churches.

[1:03]
Did you get along to this one, Scott? You came to the last one. I've done the, I've just done the in-between. So I've done a whole bunch of mini-concils with each of the churches. So they reached part of the leadership development program at two or three years ago. And so we went back in, revised, had a look at all their kind of church consults. And what we said kind of two or three years ago, he's where you should be, he's what you should be up to. And so I've caught up with each of their teams to kind of re-assess that and give them some 12 to 18 months, sort of, you know, sort of guidelines.

[1:35]
So I've chatted with all the churches recently but I didn't get along to the TDP this week. So let me tell you on that, what has been the one thing that you've noticed most beneficial about doing that thinking? Because often we just do it with senior leaders but he doing it the whole thing. It's been the most beneficial thing about that. Oh, I think, well, I think there's no secrets when you've got a team in the room, you know, as I said, you've used the talks, you can see the other team go, well, maybe, you know, we want to tweak it or think about it a little bit differently or… But wherever, estimating things, we want to, you know, wind it back a little bit. But really, what the benefit is actually, you actually see a whole team wrestling with how do we actually reach the lost and increasing numbers?

[2:15]
How do we actually see people grow and their knowledge and their love of Jesus? And it is great when you see a team answering that question, not just a senior minister saying, you know, he's what we're hoping to do. So I guess the thing that I've seen is we have seen churches often do more than, you know, more than what we kind of put in front of them. And I think the big thing I've seen is just the importance of being intentional. And putting some intentional kind of guidelines just into your year that just keep forcing you to ask that question about, well, what are we doing? What could we change?

[2:50]
What could we do differently in order to see more people wonder Jesus or to see more people grow in their knowledge and love of Jesus? So just that intentional asking of that question. And it was good to see some of them actually use tools that we kind of gave them. And I think the biggest did so for me was, man, we just did things so low-fi, two or three years ago. I've amazed at some of the things that your team, you know, your team and the analysed team have kind of brought in that have just made it so much easier to kind of assess and get a handle on how things are.

[3:22]
Yep, Chris and Corpina done an amazing job there. But listen, the TDP is not what we're talking about today, but the tools that you've mentioned there, the team development program. And for the leadership development program, which is for the senior leader, Digmar deeply into their leadership as well, one of the things we do to help churches think through where they're at the church and where they're healthy and evangelistic and multiplying, is we do have a snapshot tool, which is what you're talking about today. Of an air-UF press play on another episode of the One Thing, church health indicators to see if you are healthy.

[3:54]
Today's podcast is brought to you by Church Suite, software that supports Kingdom Builders that's here to stay. Trusted by thousands of churches with responsive support and customer-focused updates. At to church suite.com forward slash EU. And now back to the podcast. Well, statistics are kind of the eyes glaze over as you talk about this topic often. So we want to talk about how do you get a snapshot of a church at a point in time.

[4:25]
And let me talk about the genesis of this tool that's now part of our full church health consultation. But this tool kind of started off in just looking at five growth indicators we call them. How can you get a sense of whether a church is healthy and it's growing? One of the first things is just that simple measure of average service attendance. We want to see that a church is actually growing, you know, growing year on year. The second was conversion growth. Healthy churches, not only are they seeing growth addition each year,

[4:57]
but they're also seeing professions of people actually come to follow Jesus. Another key growth indicator was it actually looked like their local community. So a really simple way just to mention that is the average age in a church doesn't line up with the average age for the local community. And then two other ones that are helpful to kind of push into were people actually serving in church life. And so again, this is one of those measures that's not just about making sure people are on rosters,

[5:29]
but actually seeing people regularly serve is a sign of actually people joined and in and all in. And so it can help you assess and see a whole bunch of things in terms of people casting vision, but actually people being bought in to being a part of this church. And another one that you can kind of see that as well is what I call sort of secondary giving. So people giving over and above the offer tree, but people giving to new projects, people giving to out things outside of church. Again, you can just, you can see the half of the people for more than just themselves.

[6:00]
And then the final one is a new comma system. Is there just a simple way of people getting their names recorded so they can actually be followed up? And often you can't actually see this in a metric or in a score. You see it in what we call, I guess, the front door on the back door. You see it in the back door in terms of people actually just sort of sticking and staying. That actually tells me there is a good functioning new comma system, but really you just need to see it on the Sunday. So the snapshot tool which has about 12 different measures, started from those sort of five really simple things that you can actually get quite easily.

[6:35]
How many people were converted last year? Tell us about the size of the church last year on a Sunday in terms of people actually coming to church regularly. Tell me, is there a new comma system? Literally, tell me the names of the people that came that were new last week to church. Let's have a quick look at your finances and your budget. What actually needed just to cover things? What was actually given over above? And tell me how the people are serving in your church? I want to dig into some of those in more detail, but I just want to pick up on what you've just done there. Because this is used in, we use this in consults when we're talking to church.

[7:06]
And there's a snapshot in time, but the way in which it is used is absolutely crucial. Because it's not a sledgehammer. This is a conversation piece. This one as well. So what you've just done there in the conversion numbers that you've just spoken about as well is, and even in the newcomers, you've asked tell me the people. You've said, you've talked about people there, not tell me the numbers there. Who are the people who came last week? Yeah, that, yeah. So, well, we'll just say newcomers. Yeah, tell me the people. So that tells me if you've got a system. If you can actually say, yeah, yeah, older bloke with gray hair turned up with three boys and a wife, you know, then I go, great.

[7:43]
Now, hopefully he'll come back a second week and next time around you'll actually get a name. Or you realise that he talked to John and say you'll find out from John. So it doesn't need to be the most amazingly sophisticated system. It actually can just be something written down on a piece of paper. But you need some way of capturing and following people up. And it's hard to say about people. The other thing this conversation does is it helps us because it's a conversation with churches. We have in public, like with the whole team, not paid, not just paid, but paid and unpaid. It begins to promote a conversation around what's important, what's happening, what these health indicators mean on the ground.

[8:19]
Because there's always nuance with them. But one of the things that I find helpful about this is generally if I ask a guy who's learning a church, how many people were there last Sunday? They can tell me that answer. If I ask them how many people were converted in the last 12 months, they scratch around for an answer. And so that conversation there based on these numbers often is a helpful indicator into where their priorities are and where they might need to refocus. But let's just dig into some of these health indicators that you use here.

[8:50]
Talk to me about, first of all, the, let's start with conversion. Because for us, this is right front and center of what we're about. We want to see churches that are reaching people. Now, we've, there's a kind of three to five percent range that we might talk about. What does that mean? Three to five percent conversion range. So if we think about 100, if you've got 100 people in your church, your desired outcome, what you're praying for, what you're hoping for is, is hopefully that all those non-Christians who come to your church make first-time professions,

[9:20]
that would be, that would be the hope, but that's not the reality. But a healthy church will be regularly seeing three to five percent, looking at your average service attendance of people actually making first-time professions of faith. Now, you can get, you can be more deliberate with that and understand, you know, baptisms, which could be child baptisms, could be adult baptisms. You could also be youth professions of faith. It could be confirmations depending on your, on your tradition. So you can get a greater sense, but generally in that hill snapshot tool,

[9:52]
we're just thinking about adult conversions. So that's, that's what we're looking for, their adult professions of faith. And again, it's a, it's a hard number. It's, it's people, because we want to, we actually want to count them and celebrate them and give thanks to God for them. And then it's a percentage of, here's what you should be aiming for, three to, you know, three to five percent. Now, you can get greater, over time, you get greater, certainly on that number and what you're aiming for by, by looking at trend data and looking at, you know, past history. But generally we, we would say a healthy church is regularly selling professions of faith.

[10:23]
And in some ways, what's sitting below that is a whole bunch of inputs. You know, so it's, it's raising the kind of evangelistic heat and temperature. People praying, you know, praying for non-Christians. It's, it's, people attending evangelistic courses. And then people attending follow up evangelistic courses. So there's a whole bunch of inputs that go into that. But generally what we've seen is that 25% of people who, who go through a conversion engine, who have a chance to be challenged with the gospel and find out more about Jesus,

[10:55]
generally make first-time professions of faith. And, and I say to church should have a big prayer that they want to see, you know, 4%, you know, conversions happening annually. So that's just kind of unpicking that hard number of how many people and, and a percentage. Okay, I'll ask you one more and then I want to come back to a contextual question. You've got average attendancy growth would be 5% to 7% each year annually for church. Yeah, so, so I think if you've got a good front door to back door,

[11:25]
you should be able to grow it at 10% each year. So one of the things I've got to put in front of a whole bunch of leadership teams often is just, there's this number again, thinking about 100, 100 people. Generally, if you've got a good, good front door, you should see at least that same amount of people. And, and I generally push for kind of 1.5 times or even two times. So if you've got a healthy front door, you should be seeing about 200 people, you know, visit your church. So what does that look like? That looks like three to four people each week who are visiting and checking out church.

[11:57]
But really, there might be some weeks where you have, you know, one or two, there'll be other weeks where you have, you know, 20 or 30. But a healthy church has a healthy front door. So a church of 100 should at least say 100 people. If you've got a healthy back door and they're retaining people and people are sticking, they should see 20% of those people stay. So that means at the end of the year, 100 visitors are come, 20 people stick, you should be at 120. Now, the reality is people move. In some contexts, they move every two to three years. So that's a city or, you know, near a university population.

[12:27]
In an urban context, suburban context, they're moving probably every seven to 13 years. So you'll have loss and people die, people fall away, people leave your church, they have conflict. So you should lose about 10%. So then you minus 10%, which then means a church should grow on average at about 10%, which means every 10 years, they'll double in size. Now, generally, generally, in most contexts, there's more rapid growth because you're in a new growth there and lots of people moving in.

[13:02]
In other contexts, we're actually, the town is declining. So mining, you know, some mining communities or some towns where we're actually, they're quite stagnant. But I think even in a stagnant population, so I was working with the church just last week, their local population hadn't seen any change. And in the population of very limited change, you could see that because the average age went up two years. So actually people were sticking around. This is a suburban context. It was 29,000 people in the area. It still continue to be 29,000 people in the area.

[13:32]
So there's very little change in movement, but they had actually grown significantly. So, you know, it depends on the context, but at the same time, looking at the numbers and not seeing any growth, should forces at least to ask a question, what's going on with our front door? Do people actually know about us? What's actually going on with our back door? Are we actually sticking and holding on to people? Two very good questions. One, are you saying that all healthy churches grow?

[14:02]
Well, healthy churches grow. Yes, in the sense that, in a healthy church, people ought to be growing in their spiritual love of Jesus. So, you know, my parent hope is that everyone grows in their knowledge and their love of Jesus. You're not talking necessarily about numbers. That's right. But at the same time. Yeah, at the same time. I would be hoping that for the most part of church ought to see growth. There'll be some contextual issues. Second question here. Are you saying that if we get all these systems right, our church will grow? No, not at all. Because again, you know, it only takes one conflict, potentially for you to lose a whole bunch of people.

[14:42]
There are seasons where you don't see people coming through for whatever reason. So, no. Okay, so that's great. So I ask those questions, particularly because I think sometimes we are misheard when we're talking about this within the network. Not to you and I, but our network when we talk about the desire for health and we're using these things, not as sledgehammers and not as simplistic answers to stuff. To say, here are some helpful questions to ask. If we are trying to move towards being healthy and reaching the last, understanding our identities and caught up in this and things might differ in our context.

[15:19]
So we're okay with that, but we still ask our questions. Hence why it's a snapshot. It's helping you assess and measure things and ask those questions, helping you be intentional. Now, can I ask, there's a lot in you, a number of the metrics health indicators that we use, which are really helpful. Can I just talk about the staff ratio one? Is that all right? Because I've been chatting to someone about this recently. They've been asking some questions into it. We've got on our snapshot, it's one staff around about to 65 to 90 people now.

[15:52]
Is that 65 to 90 adults you're thinking is it a one staff member, which is full-time pastoral employer? Is that include admin support or other support? What are those numbers in there? Yeah, so you'd say it's a range. It's a range because if you're wanting to grow often, there's a sense that you actually have to overstaff. So you have to start before you actually see the growth. So often to actually push past the growth barrier, you actually have to rent a bigger premise, which is bigger than what you need.

[16:25]
You have to employ more staff before you need. So a growing church generally will be in that sort of 65, one to 65 number and a church plant often. Again, because you just don't have a large amount of people. So you're often overstaffed for a time. So I say the 65 number is for a church that's wanting to grow. Generally, a lean church. So once you're up and running and driving forward, a ratio of one to 80. And I am thinking about adults here. A ratio of one to 80 is generally what a lean church is.

[17:00]
And there are some efficiencies you can get over certain sizes. So that's why I have the number of one to 90. But in some ways, it also depends. So a lot of these numbers come from just reading a whole bunch of American books and other things. The Ministry of Model in America is different. They don't have, say, the small group structure that we have in Australia, which I think requires more staff and more intensity in order to manage that into that. Because we're trying to go deep. We're trying to go deep and not just wide. So again, these are hard numbers. It doesn't take into account the capacity of your people on your ministry staff team.

[17:38]
So some people have a capacity to give a whole bunch of output and others don't. And so you can't just go, OK, let's switch in one person and it'll immediately fire. Also, it takes time, I think, for any staff person to fire as well in ministry. I think we often have over expectations about how much someone's going to be able to do in six months as opposed to 18 months. So you're not going to immediately put a staff member in an expect growth and change. It'll take time. The other thing just to say about the staffing ratio as well is I generally include in that full time past or stuff, which is not to say administration staff are important.

[18:17]
I'll say for every one staff full time staff member, you probably want to be employing point two or point four. So one to two days, administration staff so you can get the most out of your paid past or staff team as well. So I don't generally count that number in there. And I also don't count in an MTS or an apprentice or a student minister. Now, let's not say they're not important and they're not vital. We should every church should be pregnant with a future leader in their mix.

[18:53]
But I think it's just a, it's recognizing the reality that both the apprentice and the student minister actually have a cost, a training cost. And so I kind of feel like the point too that you get out of them is often, you know, is often a cost as well. Now, here that cost, that is a really important cost to bear because the fruit of that is someone moving towards full time gospel, you know, said a ministry. So that's where that number comes from. Now, the other thing I do want to say is often I see a lot of our churches are over staffed.

[19:23]
And I think that's one of the, one of the reasons why we actually don't see that volunteer engagement that serving number come up. And so again, often, often, you know, we employ for a role and to get a task done and that often takes away from others. So whenever we're kind of adding staff, we want to be adding people who multiply our multiply the work and actually work through others. And then one final caveat in a city context, often think in a city context, you have to over, over staff. Partly because people are time poor. So that's one, but I don't want to give that excuse.

[19:57]
So I want you to work hard at discipling people and giving them higher expectations for church life. They're not only time poor, but there's lots of turnover. So I think there's just a lot of work you got to do to train, raise up and develop people. Yeah, that's a, that is a trigger on isn't it because it, there's also often, not always, often more money within cities as well. And so it is possible to start where other places is not possible. And so you can't, even if you wanted to. And so you can create, yes, those demands, I think, really, you've just said there, but you can also over staff merely because you can.

[20:32]
Yeah. And so I guess I want to say with any, with any staffing position and thinking about this area, it needs to follow your strategy. It needs to follow sort of the where of where you're going as a church and your priorities as well. And you need to reflect on your capacities as a senior leader from talking to senior leaders. You need to reflect on the capacities of your team as well. So you want to, you want to employ and raise up people that are not necessarily lucky. So you've got a well-rounded team.

[21:02]
And you want to pay attention to people's capacity. So there will be capacities and points in time where some people are able to give you greater output. And then sometimes not going to be, if you're less output. And that's just where, you know, we're not dealing with robots, we're dealing with human beings. Human beings. Well, Scott, what's the one thing that you would want to say to people around church health indicators? Regularly take a snapshot of health of your church. At least once a quarter so you can better intentionally reach the lost and grow people in your church.

[21:34]
Excellent. Well, some of the things in the toolbox today, you've got a picture of these indicators. Jump on the show notes and you'll see them there. On the website, there's more help in a number of these areas. So whether it's one thing podcast, there's articles or interviews with people from the network. There's a number of resources across the website in order to contact us to just find that. If you want some more help finding information on a specific church health indicator. Finally, as we've mentioned a couple of times, this is part of our consults to help churches grapple with where they're at.

[22:06]
And what the reality is now in order for them to assess how it is they continue to move towards health and reaching the people around them. So contact us if you want more information about that. Thanks for joining us on the one thing today. If you've got a topic you'd like us to cover, please email resources at reachastrailear.com.au. Check out the new resource page. Great job team. On that one, I'm Derek Canter. I'm Scott Sanders. Chatsoon.

[22:36]
Thanks for joining us.