What is a Sunday for? You might answer that it’s for the purpose of seeing new people come in, explore the faith, and get saved. The car parking and seat fill might then flow from that, though your diagnostic questions will be at a higher level. I, as regular readers will know, think differently about Sundays to that. Sundays are for the church to worship God. My diagnostic questions are going to start from that premise.

In ministry ‘success criteria’ matter.

On the face of it that sounds like business speak, exactly the sort of thing I am critical of creeping into pastoral work.

Except I’m not sure that’s it. Practically speaking, to do something well you need to know how you are going to assess it afterwards. I’ve noticed in multiple churches that when we review things we review them against a whole range of unvoiced criteria. This can lead to significant mismatches in expectations, which can be awkward. Even at the basic level of your Sunday worship you need some sense of what good looks like in order to improve, change, or be happy with things as they are.

Again, practically speaking, it is much simpler to determine these before you do something. Doing so afterwards will make your internal sense of what did and didn’t go well shape your criteria. The thing that didn’t work will loom large in your mind even if it doesn’t have anything to do with the actual way we ‘assess’ whatever the event was.

For a Sunday, you can’t really discuss ‘before’ as we’re always in between Sundays, but divorcing the conversation about what ‘good’ looks like from a conversation about reviewing a given Sunday would be helpful. In my experience, church leaders tend to get obsessed by controllable things and things that go wrong. My suspicion is that if you wrote your success criteria for a generic Sunday meeting you would find that some of those things are uncontrollable and others are not the same things that go wrong.

Hopefully we would write theological criteria, because it’s not just about knowing what success is, but about knowing where you’re heading. In place of success criteria I could just as easily talk about telos and all of a sudden sound less business-speak and more intellectual pastor, because I used a Greek word. Something’s telos is its end, its goal, the thing that it is aimed towards. In James K. A. Smith’s thinking, the telos is the thing that is ultimately loved and worshipped. Our success criteria for anything we do are essentially what we ultimately are looking for from that thing. They are our desires.

What we intend—by which I mean what we desire—is what we achieve. Of course that isn’t entirely true all of the time, but it is what we will attempt to achieve. The converse is true too, what we achieve was what we intended, what we desired, 90% of the time. You get what you aim for.

The point here is threefold: first, it’s almost impossible to effectively review something if you don’t have something to review it against. That’s logical, but we manage to not set our standards up beforehand very often and instead just do things. It’s an easy trap to fall into; understandable, but unhelpful. We need to take a strategic step back and ask ‘why are we doing this?’ about everything that we do.

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