Measuring Ministry Success without Worrying About Numbers

A nice piece on effective youth ministry from Kurt Willems today. (HT: Rob Martin) Willems talks about his experience early in his career as a youth pastor where he was basically told that the worth of his ministry was related to how many students showed up. Willems suggests a different economy:

Many people ask me what we should measure if it’s not numbers and attendance. I think I’ve finally begun to figure this out. I recently took a course on church planting. In this class, one of the things we talked about was the need to change the ministry scorecard (to borrow Reggie McNeil’s language). Instead of measuring success by numbers and quotas, what if we measure success by stories of how God is at work through various signs of the kingdom that we see in our context? In other words, in ministry and in any church function, what is our primary goal? Is it to meet quotas? Is it you rant and rave about how many showed up? Nope, it’s not all about the numbers! It’s all about the kingdom!

If we want to know if a particular ministry is being “successful” we should ask the following question: What signs of the kingdom have we seen or experienced during the past week? All other measurements of success fall subservient to that single question.

Check out the rest here. I think we do a pretty good job of that at McBIC, though I know the numbers have come along as well. Our focus is on what God is doing among the youth.

TED Talk Tuesday: Part 2

In light of all of the debate over the SOPA/PIPA controversy, I was delighted to see this lighthearted talk that takes a look at the math behind the claims that the music/movie industry makes about their losses due to copyright infringement.

TED Talk Tuesday part 3 coming around 6:00 today.

Math Humor from Frazz

If you don’t read Frazz daily, I really think that you are missing out. Here is a particularly good one from a few days ago:

The Mathematics of the Game SET

The Cover Image for the Game SET

SET is an extremely addictive, fast-paced card game found in toy stores nationwide. Although children often beat adults, the game has a rich mathematical structure linking it to the combinatorics of finite affine and projective spaces and the theory of error-correcting codes. Last year an unexpected connection to Fourier analysis was used to settle a basic question directly related to the game of SET, and many related questions remain open.

So begins a recent paper on the elegant mathematics of the card game SET. For those of us who enjoy card games that require logic and quick thinking, rather than simply luch, and the mathematical beauty and surprising interconnectedness of different mathematical fields, this paper is interesting. Warning: you need a certain level of algebraic understanding to follow the paper (having had an algebraic structures course beyond “linear algebra” in college will help). The paper starts out by giving the background of the development of the game, and how it is played. Then the authors turn to problems of algebraic interest regarding the game and show how to answer some of these questions.

Personally, I love the game. I was introduced while visiting my graduate alma mater (Virginia Tech) by a former student here at Messiah College who was in graduate school at Tech. She introduced my wife and I to the game, and I fell in love. For those familiar with the game SET, or would like to try it out, it is available online here.