I was texting a little with Spriggs tonight, and he asked the question, “If you were a pastor or leader, how would you measure success in your ministry?”

It’s a good question, and I suppose, in some ways, it’s a very American question, as success is historically an American preoccupation.

Not that there is anything wrong with success. Success is the difference between life and death in cases involving surgery, human flight, Evel Knievel jumps, and elevated tightrope walking.

But in the cult of success, what ultimately matters is one’s place in the standings.

And I’m not success-proofed. Like many Americans, I can be a bit of a sports nut, especially when it comes to my alma mater’s sprts teams, and to my beloved Cubs. I get as bent as the next guy about standings watches, what happened last night, who my team plays next, and how the trajectory of the season is going. I get wrapped up in sports, and sports fanaticism goes well in the cult and culture of success.

And Steve is familiar with the thrill of riding the wave of your team’s success through a sports season. As a Dodger fan, he’s tasted much of that the last few years. We are both big baseball fans, and it is part of our connection as friends to this day. During the summer and on into fall, quiet dialogues between us will pick up as we scout the National League and update each other on what our teams are doing. And we each hope our team is winning.

There was a movement that crept into baseball in the 1990’s, though, and then swept through it over the last decade and some, which involved the marriage of statistical measures with performance improvements.

Sabremetrics, the empirical analysis of baseball, pioneered by Bill James and his peers at the Society for American Baseball Research which was founded in 1971. It took until the mid-1980’s before the Mets and then the Rangers added stats guys on their staffs to help apply stat findings to staff decision making. In the 90’s, Billy Beane and Oakland used Sabremetrics extensively to create a contending ball club composed of specially selected undervalued players. After Beane’s experiment with SABR’s leading ideas led to success on the field, Sabremetrics was embraced across professional baseball.

And with the warm reception of the use of analytics in the game, the way the game- and players- were looked at also changed. In the old days, stats like batting averages, earned run averages, and runs batted in were seemingly adequate to quantify the quality of a pitcher or hitter. With the emergence of baseball analytics, though, suddenly a whole set of new and arguably better metrics entered baseball parlance, seemingly out of nowhere. The nerds were conquering baseball with insightful numbers like weighted on-base average, wins above replacement, batting average on balls in play, fielding independent pitching, and ultimate zone ratings, calculations that each added description and insight to player abilities.

And draped modern baseball in a cloak of mathematical formulas, so that in any conversation of merit about players and teams, the stats substantiated the potential of a given club or player, to the extent that draft selections, player contract offerings and Vegas odds could be impacted by shifts in a particular player or team statistic.

Success on the field became somewhat dependent and tied to success in the war room and the manager’s office, where the calculator and computer provided probabilities for a team’s success.

The statistical models spoke.

But when the season starts, the game still have to be played, and when a father takes his son to a first pro game, or the boys at the office head out for an afternoon at the park, they aren’t there to see modulations in BABiP, or a rise in xFIP. They go to see their favorite teams and their favorite players play the opponent for the win, complimented by some highlight reel plays. The fans and the players both go to live out the game.

What does Sabermetrics and baseball have to do with the conversation about the successful pastor?

When I was growing up as a Southern Baptist kid in the 1970’s and 1980’s, Wednesday evenings were the important event midweek on the church calendar, because that was outreach night. As an evangelical, sharing the gospel is a key aspect of church life (as it should be), but our church had a good process down on Wednesday nights. You came around 6 to Fellowship Hall for dinner, and then after that, you pulled a card or two with the names of family members that had visited the church, and then you went out and called them, or drove to their house and dropped in on them, hoping that the cordial conversation might lead to a presentation of the Four Spiritual Laws tract of your Evangelism Explosion presentation. After visits, every congregant who went out came back and filled out a report that, by night end was rolled into a stat sheet. X number of visits were made. Y presentations of the gospel were made. Z decisions for Christ were made. The nightly report was added to the rest for the month, and combined with the monthly giving reports (expected vs. actual), provided a summarized indicator of the health of the church.

Missed in the stats collection process were number of jackets given, number of food bags distributed, number of tears shed over stories of loss and brokenness, number of encouraging words said between soldiers sent out driving to and from their visitor visits, which is all “part of the game” of living out the Christian faith.

We modern Americans love our stats. But when they detract from the game, they lose their value, because stats can only allude to the reality of what we are trying to isolate as important- in baseball, or in church life. But they do not give us the whole story, nor provide us with promises about our eventual success. They just point at what is going on, and suggest trends and choices we can make to sustain those trends.

Ultimately, in baseball, the team’s goal is to win enough games during the regular season to be able to play in the playoffs to be able to win the league championship. Getting to, and winning, the last game of the year in the league is ultimately what all these nifty team and player stats are supposed to help a team do. Success, in baseball, is a championship.

What is success in church life? A high count of gospel presentations? A high count of baptisms? A high count of visits to the food pantry by the local community? A high count of salvation professions? Or a high count of lives changed by the persistent presence of the gospel?

It’s a good question, Steve. How should a pastor measure success in the life of his church.

Sunday school attendance and giving records are good, but in these modern statistical times, I bet we could come up with some really decent stats which quantify a few other key things, like congregant faith. And hope. And certainly, we need a solid, well-rounded stat for love.

But let’s just keep them simple. Because Jesus like to keep it that way as well.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another.”
– John 13:34

I suspect if you can help your people to do this, Pastor, you are doing a fantastic job.