My colleagues hate it when I read, especially something that isn’t religious, theological or churchy! For instance, when I read Googled: The End of the World as We Know It I ended up in a conference in California, and we spent an entire fall in conversations about how the Internet is changing the way we do church.
So they were less than enthused to learn that I had watched a webinar from the Brookings Institute on the release of a new book, Show Me the Evidence: Obama’s Fight for Rigor and Results in Social Policy.
The Cliff note version is that too often in pubic policies we don’t put our money on proven effective programs. We just do what feels good, what we have always done. We don’t know if it does any good. That will not work any longer. In an age where discretionary spending is being reduced, the authors make the point that we must put our money where the proof is. What is proven to work? That is where we spend our resources.
Jump back to church.
It seems obvious to anyone who has been paying attention that resources are being reduced. Over the past 6 years our church has seen a reduction in our budget. This year we will finally return to what our budget was in 2007. At least, that is our hope. At the same time we have seen a reduction in “other” resources—time, energy, etc. We have fewer in choirs, fewer on Wednesday nights, fewer in worship.
Does that feel familiar to anyone?
Yet we still keep on pouring resources into programs that we don’t know are effective. We have no idea if Sunday School increases knowledge of the Bible. We don’t know if a mission project changes anything. We don’t know that anyone leaves worship transformed. But we still keep doing the same thing!
Even worse, we don’t even know if they fit into our vision for our church, mainly because we have never asked the questions.
What are we trying to do here?
What would it look like if we really were making disciples of Jesus?
How would we know?
How can it be measured? How will we know if we are making a difference?
What would it take to make that happen?
Are there programs that are not effective that we keep doing just because? (The answer is yes, and we could come up with a long list, but that is not the point!)
These are not easy questions to answer. They will demand deep soul searching, and hard decisions, but these times demand nothing less. Continuing on like we have in a time of diminishing resources is just foolish. Even more, it does nothing to bring us nearer to the Kingdom of God.