QUOTE : There’s an old wooden sign in the church my dad grew up in. It still hangs on the left wall behind the pulpit. Maybe you’ve seen one like it. The sign has slats that display numbers announcing the church’s critical statistics. There is a column for “Last Week” and a column for “This Week.” Every Sunday you can check out how things are progressing in three areas: attendance, the number of visitors, and total offerings. I can remember, as a kid, looking up at the numbers and thinking, Things are getting better. Or during some weeks, Things are getting worse. That sign has been hanging there for at least thirty years, but I’m not sure it truly communicates whether or not the church is actually winning. Most churches do not have a reliable system for defining and measuring what success looks like at every level of the organization. Instead they post some general statistics that give them a vague sense of progress or failure as a church, and they go through the motions of continuing to do ministry the way they always have, productive or not. Thus it is possible for a church to become very efficient at doing ministry ineffectively.