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Discipleship Statistics

In sports mad Melbourne lots of internet, radio, tv and newspaper time is devoted to statistics for football.  It seems that every year there is some new statistic.  The reason for this is that coaches and commentators are trying to find statistics that help explain the performance of teams and the ultimate statistic - the score board.  You see there isn't much value in turning up to training and saying 'the other team scored more points than us, we have to do better next week'.  It doesn't give you anything specific to work on.  However if you can say your tackle rate was down or your efficiency of your disposals was low that then gives you some things you can work on that have a chance of influencing the overall result.

It can be similar with discipleship.  Churches often measure Attendance, Buildings (number and size) and Cash (offerings).  But these don't really give you any useful information about discipleship and actually becoming more like Jesus in your everyday life.   That is why we have started measuring the number of Kairoi (God moments) we have processed around the learning circle (observe - reflect - discuss - plan - account - act), and the number of valuable discipleship meetings we have been a part of.  On a Sunday every month or so we ask people to look back over the previous month to count these to things and then we collate them. 

This has two benefits:
  • It gives us an idea of how discipleship is trending across the church community, and
  • It helps raise individuals awareness of these important aspects of discipleship.




David Wanstall, 11/02/2011