Measuring vs counting

I was looking through Brad Brisco's nice little ebook 'Covocational Church Planting: Aligning Your Marketplace Calling and The Mission of God.' I haven't read through it all, but the first thing that caught my eye was chapter 19 "Creating New Scorecards," and his thoughts on counting and measuring.

He says the church has largely been in the counting business (buildings, budgets, and butts), and we need to move more toward measuring in order to see how our churches are really doing. As he writes on pp.225-226:

"Counting is giving attention to numbers. When counting, the question to be answered is: 'How many?' It is quantitative. Conversations about 'how many?' are most frequently conversations about resources but can also be about activities. Conversations about resources in a time of limited resources are commonly conversations about sufficiency, 'Do we have enough?' or, 'How can we get more?' ... 'Do we have enough money for that mission?' or 'Do we have enough volunteers for that ministry?'...

"Measuring is giving attention to change. When measuring, the question is not about 'How many?' but rather about 'How far?' Conversations about 'How far?' are frequently about the change that can be measured over a particular time, as in, 'How far have we come over the past year?' Measuring is about qualitative change. Has the quality of something changed over time? In other words, has something gotten better or worse since the last time we measured?

Now, he does note that counting needs to be done too. BUT...

"Because the church is a missionary entity... one of the things we should count are missionary behaviors. You should be asking and counting things like: How many neighbors have I gotten to know by name in the past month? How many coworkers have I gotten to know on a deeper level? How many significant conversations..." (things like that)

This was pretty insightful to me, and I think an important distinction. A friend and I have been discussing the role of the fruit of the spirit in evaluating discipleship efforts in the church for awhile (and 'efforts' is a bad word, I know). I guess what we've been trying to figure out is how do we measure discipleship... in people's lives, and the life of the church?  We happen to think if you are a disciple of Jesus, the fruit of the Spirit should become more evident in your life. So this fits right into this discussion on measuring vs counting.

Typically the church has merely "counted" disciples as those who got baptized, or those who 'came forward' or those who joined the church (or merely attend services). I don't believe that's a valid count of disciples. Not everyone who does those things is necessarily a follower of Jesus, and just because one has done so doesn't necessarily mean they will continue to grow. So a much better metric is to measure their growth (imho).

Anyway, there was much more detail in the book and I recommend it to anyone interested in such. Whether I get around to looking through the rest of it or not, this little bit was helpful in itself!

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Galatians 5:22-23

"But the Holy Spirit produces this kind of fruit in our lives: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. There is no law against these things!"