9 Acknowledge ... The Power Of Ratios

Church leaders are social beings as a rule and as such drift away from detail — particularly statistics. They may acknowledge the worth of statistics somewhere in the universe but find it difficult to think in terms of being bound by them. I don’t know an advocate of keeping attendance records who believes that by itself is a proof of church malaise or health. But in the end of the day everything comes down to numbers because every person is represented by the number one. And therefore the church is only the aggregation of those ones.
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned at some grand church conference that it isn’t about the numbers. Perhaps the chairman of the conference explains that the participants come from churches large and small and communities large and small and that there are no insignificant places or insignificant people. Faithfulness is the measure of success. There are the obligatory and hearty amens. And then after a short pause the chairman goes on to introduce the speaker of the day. The glowing terms always include statistics. It is about the size of the church. It is about the number of paid staff. It is about the number of ministries. It is about the number of church members who have gone on to be missionaries. It is about the number of books the speaker has published. All of that is evidence to point to the success of the speaker and therefore the reason the speaker has been engaged for the event. Perhaps even to tell the success story.
I am always glad to hear about big and successful. And I enjoy listening to the perspective and wisdom of the speaker. Usually I draw the conclusion the speaker was well chosen. However, often it has been forgotten that the road to big and successful started with small and untried. In the present case, small and untried apparently turned into small and successful before it got to big and successful. Most successful people will tell you that they learned more from their failures than they did from their successes. Perhaps sharing some of the small unsuccessful endeavors with the attendant lessons would serve better than the tale of success. Or at the very minimum, most leaders would be well served by hearing the small success stories or the story of the pains on the trail to the success.
Not Big Or Small
I would like to put big and small into the background. I’m not sure they count for much. I would rather understand more about growth. And sometimes that growth is not as numerically transparent as one would hope. It is hard to track the route from the day that child responded to Christ in the Sunday school class under the ministry of some obscure but faithful servant/teacher. As often as not, when it does happen, that Sunday school teacher never saw the success during their natural days. You never know what will grow from the good seeds you plant. Just keep on planting.
According to Jesus sometimes the harvest has a 30 to 1 ratio, a 60 to 1 ratio, and sometimes it has a 100 to 1 ratio. You can never figure that out at the time of planting. But you can know this. If you plant good seed there will be a harvest that far outstrips the bag of seed you started with.
All of that speaks to the grand and eternal scale of things. But in the micro world in which we live day to day we must be wise stewards of our resources of time and money. We need to understand the results hour for hour, pound for pound and dollar for dollar. After all is said and done, it is all about the efficiency and effectiveness of everything we put out. If we invest a buck and somehow through a chain of actions that buck doesn’t come back to us in donations we won’t be able to reinvest it and keep the process alive. When the buck brings a return of two bucks then we are on to something. That is a 100% return on investment if it happens in the same year!
There are ways to measure some things in ministry. If we subsequently use the measurements we take then they were well worth taking in the first place. It might not make sense to keep track of the attendance figures if they will prove no future significance. The trouble is we can’t know what the future significance might be. So it seems to me we may as well keep track just in case. Meticulous record keeping can yield very positive insight at a future date.
Realism
I have found that it helps the Christian leader to keep their feet on the ground if they know what to expect from a numerical perspective. When I was a young pastor I initiated an evangelistic campaign in the church. There was a high level of involvement of people in the planning and in the execution. From many perspectives the program was a roaring success. Within the congregation we conducted an “each one reach one” initiative. We prayed for individuals and families by name. The list wasn’t as long as I had wished but it was significant. Many of the church people did bring someone with them to the banquets we conducted. The message was clear. The atmosphere was positive and energized. In terms of follow-up we planned some Bible studies for those who wanted to learn more.
Given the information we had at the time we conducted a very successful campaign. But the information we had at the time was incomplete. The premises I was working with were not realistic. As far as I know, there was not one convert from all that effort.
I didn’t understand how many invitations needed to be given out to achieve the results we longed for. I didn’t understand how many touches it would take to engage people in their first Bible study. Most telling of all, I really didn’t understand that if we didn’t follow up with people one at a time they wouldn’t harvest themselves. We never talked to them personally to get them to yes or no.
But I’m not the only naive one. A few years ago we helped some people start one new church in particular. That church is thriving today. There were three 06 people at the first service. And then the church settled in to an attendance in the 150 neighborhood and has grown from there. The week after the first service I had a pastor from another church call me to ask how we got such an astounding response from such a multi-ethnic and hard community. I explained that we communicated with as many people as we could to find those who were willing to hear from us over the phone and through the mail. Eventually we invited them to church. I asked that pastor to guess how many phone calls it took to get three 06 people out to a first service with a very small launch team. That pastor said we must have made quite a few. I said, “Yes but could you guess a number on that for me?” This person said, “It must have been about 600 phone calls!” I responded with, “Would you believe over four 7,000?” This seminary trained church leader had no idea what it would take. I expect this pastor has moved on to look for something easier. I have never heard back.
Establish the Range of Results
No matter what you do you have to have an understanding of what your efforts are likely to produce. If you do something often enough and track your efforts you will begin to develop a ratio. Once you understand the ratio of the number of actions you must take to get a particular result, it gets easier on you. Let’s just for a moment say it takes X number of actions to achieve Y results. Then we know that in order to get 10Y results we need to conduct 10X actions. Never make the mistake in church life of setting a numerical objective of 100Y when you have no idea how many actions it takes to achieve that. You cannot manage the results nearly as easily as you can manage the actions. If you know your ratios you won’t even come close to imagining a result of 100Y if you haven’t established the cost of 100X. If all you can muster in human terms is enough hours of volunteer service and dollars to amount to the equivalent of, say, 26X then all you can expect is results in the range of 26Y. Those who are looking for something easier to get the results you are looking for all make any number of suggestions of what they believe will work. But if they have not established realistic expectations by doing their research and even pre testing, all they will do is send you off on a wild goose chase.
That wild goose chase may lead you to the church in the next town who is claiming great results. If you like the look of the results then take a very hard look at how many actions it took to achieve those results. Maybe they have a better idea. You need to find out.
How long does it take to find one lost sheep? The answer is simple. As long as it takes. The question is, “Are you committed to finding the lost sheep in the first place?” While you can’t know exactly how long it is going to take. You can know that you are committed to finding out the hard way. Once you have found one you will have an idea about how long it might take to find the next one.
The 5% Factor
Think in terms of a 5% factor when it comes to something difficult. It will only work out 5% of the time. Only about 5% of the people you work with in your church are truly going to get in sync with you. You are going to have to find a way to leverage the participation of the 5% to move the 95% forward as far and as fast as you can. You must not get disappointed with the fact that some people simply will never get it. You have to work with the possibility of disappointment in mind. Managing the zones of grief that are created when things don’t work out as you wish is one of the most important management skills to develop.
Only about 5% of the population stand out in any measure in any realm. Once you identify a 5%er latch on and utilize that relationship as much as you possibly can.
It might even be more difficult than that. I read somewhere that Colonel Sanders loaded himself up in his car and pitched 1000 restaurants before he found one willing to take on his secret recipe. I don’t know if that’s a fact or a myth but it makes a great story anyway. And it is a fact that he started this whole pursuit rather late in life.
When you want to quit you will be able to think of a long list of reasons as to why you should. Just don’t quit until you find some good reasons. Keep adjusting your approach to everything in life in an attempt to improve the ratios on whatever it is you are doing. But don’t fall prey to the generalizations people often make. “Nobody will come out to a meeting on a Tuesday anyway.” “I can’t find anybody to help.” “There is no point in planning anything for the summer because everybody is away.” When you look under the skin of such statements you will find a high degree of narcissism. The individual speaking won’t be there on Tuesday. The person recruiting only tried one conversation. The planner didn’t want to interrupt their own vacation schedule.
When someone says they tried “that” and it didn’t work, explore with them exactly what they tried and how often they repeated their effort. I have some bouncing words I like to use. “I don’t count it a try until I have done it 21 times.” Even one round of golf gives you 18 opportunities for a good drive. And if you finally get one, that will be the only one you remember anyway. That’s what keeps duffers going. You have to be really bad at it before you start to get good at it.
Even if you are not statistically oriented you should start to keep rough count on anything that seems difficult but could produce a ratio. If your ratio that appears is 10 to 1, then you will know on average you must make 10 attempts before you even think of allowing feelings of discouragement to slow you down. And since you can’t be sure that the ratio will present itself symmetrically in equal proportions, you have to get to at least 20 actions on a 10 to 1 ratio before you start evaluating whether or not you should change your approach.
The power in all this comes with the knowledge that you can manage your activity knowing that over time things will work. You must not live in the moment when something goes poorly. Remember that in the next moment things will be different. Eventually you will reap the harvest if you do not faint.