The end of the year is often one of your busiest seasons. Between the hustle and bustle of Christmas and the various activities happening throughout the holidays, combined with planning the next calendar year and analyzing this year’s impacts, you’ve got your hands full.
Throughout the course of preparing for a new year, you’ll need to spend time looking at the data you’ve collected throughout this year.
This data will provide you with key insights into how your church has grown and changed, as well as where you need to improve and adjust to achieve success going forward.
But not all information is helpful. It’s easy to get bogged down with numbers that don’t mean anything and statistics that don’t provide any useful takeaways.
So how do you know which reports to analyze and which to ignore? How do you decide what numbers will be helpful for your ministry and which ones are distracting you from the big picture?
That’s where we come in. Here are four areas you need to spend time analyzing to help you truly understand your impacts from this year and plan well for the year to come.
1. Attendance
This may sound a bit broad, but carefully examining the attendance numbers in your congregation will give you a good idea of how your church is growing and where you can make improvements.
Using your church management solution, review your reports for attendance at small groups, services, weekly activities, and special events.
Examining your attendance numbers for regular services closely will help you see how your congregation has changed over the last year.
Your numbers for first-time visitors, including how many of those guests continued to return and how many of them became members, will indicate whether you’re successful in attracting outsiders to your congregation.
At the same time, you need to consider the number of members who attended services this year. Even if you experience positive growth in visitors and new members, if your numbers struggle with member retention, it’s a good indicator of something you need to address and work on moving forward.
The same applies to your numbers for small groups, weekly activities, and special events.
Examining the attendance data for each of these areas closely will provide a clearer picture of your congregation. With those numbers, you can better evaluate which events and activities are successful, which should be removed or redone, whether you’re offering small groups at the right times, and so much more.
2. Giving
When it comes to giving, you can see everything from who gave to the amount of each contribution to how those gifts impacted your planned budget.
But when it comes to understanding and analyzing your data, there is such a thing as too much information.
The most important reports for you to consider to evaluate this year’s impact and plan for the future are the reports on who in your congregation gave, how often they gave, and how your total giving affected your budget.
While it may be helpful at other times to examine the contributions of different individuals or families (such as when planning a pledge campaign), when it comes to end-of-year analysis and preparation, those numbers won’t be the most helpful.
Seeing who in your congregation gave and how often they gave will give you a clear picture of the stewardship embodied in your congregation. If only a few people gave a handful of times, that paints a very different picture of discipleship and obedience than if the majority of your members gave regularly throughout the year.
The other key piece of information you need is how giving impacted your budget. Did your members give more than what you’d planned? Were you struggling to make ends meet and continually requesting more support?
You can’t create a successful budget for next year without understanding how your budget was affected by giving this year.
Knowing the percentage of your members who gave and how frequently, combined with the impact of giving on your budget, will guide your financial and stewardship planning for next year better than anything else.
3. Volunteering
As disciples, we are all called to serve. That looks different for each person, and understanding how your congregants are currently volunteering in your church will help you equip and engage with them better going forward.
Your church management solution will show you how each of your members is serving and identify areas that still need coverage.
Understanding who and how your members are volunteering will help you encourage them to walk in obedience and fulfill their callings. You’ll be able to thank and show appreciation to those who have been serving faithfully and help those who haven’t to find the right fit for them.
4. Discipleship
One of the best ways to see the spiritual health of your church is to look at your statistics for discipleship over the last year.
- How many professions of faith were made?
- How many baptisms did you perform?
- How many rededications did you see?
- If you track first communion, how many participated in this rite?
- How many babies were dedicated?
- How many people joined a small group for the first time or rejoined after a time away?
- How many signed up to volunteer for the first time?
- How many shifted from part-time attendance to coming regularly?
- How many participated in counseling or sought mentorship?
There are numerous areas of discipleship within your church, and examining each one closely will help you see the overall picture of your church’s discipleship and spiritual growth over the last 12 months.
While attendance, giving, and volunteering are all great and significant aspects of the overall health of your ministry, the true measure of your church ultimately comes down to discipleship.
If you aren’t making disciples who make disciples, your church isn’t producing the fruit it should.
You can have thousands in attendance every week, process millions of dollars in giving, and see 100% of your members serving in some capacity, but if you don’t have true disciples who long to know the Lord and serve Him wholeheartedly, you’ve missed the point.
Data can reveal a great deal about your ministry. It can show you where you’re doing well and where you need to improve. But data can be overwhelming if you don’t know what numbers you need to focus on.
By looking carefully at your statistics for attendance, giving, volunteering, and discipleship, you’ll get the best picture of your church’s impact over the past year. Understanding and analyzing these numbers will help you plan for the year to come.
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