In this series of posts, I’ve been drawing on my experience from Crossfit to suggest some ways that churches can become more effective in helping people improve their spiritual fitness. You can find all the posts I’ve written related this topic in the Ready for Anything category of this blog.
Today’s post is a continuation of the discussion began in three previous posts. Please read them first for the full context of what comes next.
Have You Seen My Stretchy Pants
The Numbers Don’t Lie
The Necessity (and Danger) of Measuring Spiritual Fitness
The Core Competencies of a Christ-Follower
Perhaps the place to begin is by defining the core competencies of a Christ-follower. What are some of the most important things we can measure as we grow in Christlikeness? To keep it simple, let’s use the Fruit of the Spirit (Gal. 5:22-23) as a starting point.
We can measure growth in the areas of:
1. Love
2. Joy
3. Peace
4. Patience
5. Kindness
6. Goodness
7. Faithfulness
8. Gentleness
9. Self-control
First, we have to develop a working definition of each term so we know what we’re measuring. Let’s start with love. Followers of Jesus grow in love: love for God, love for our neighbors, and love for our enemies. How can we measure something as soft and squishy as love? In the New Testament, love is not an abstract noun. It is a verb, an action word. Love is described in terms of specific behaviors, many of which are listed in passages like 1 Corinthians 13:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Here’s my big question: Can we develop a method for measuring how much we’re growing in love as defined by the these kind of behaviors? It wouldn’t be as simple as stepping on a scale or running a mile for time, but I think it’s doable.
If we can do it for love, then we can develop an assessment built on these two questions:
1. What does joy, peace, patience, etc. look like?
2. How do we measure it?
To get the most accurate assessment we’d want to get a few of our friends and family to answer a few questions about us as well. If you want to know how well I’m doing at loving my neighbor, don’t ask me, ask my neighbor!
Yes, this would require churches to take the time to define their personal transformation goals and develop healthy ways of measuring the results. This would probably lead to a restructuring of how many churches use their time and staff resources. There would be a lot of personal coaching, conversations, evaluation, and reflection. It would be a far more challenging way of “doing church” than what is presently accepted as the norm in many congregations.
I don’t want to understate this part of my manifesto. I’m calling for churches to structure themselves around the personal transformation of their members rather than corporate programs that may or may not bring about such transformation. I say “may or may not” because no one really knows whether current programming is working, because everyone is too busy keeping the programs running to stop and actually measure whether anyone involved is becoming more like Christ because of their participation.
I’m not saying that most church programs aren’t working. I’m saying that most church leaders lack concrete data to make a case either way. They hope they work. They cling to every thread of anecdotal evidence that bolsters this hope, but they can’t say for sure. Even when someone has a great transformation story to tell they can’t be sure if it’s a happy accident or the result of intentional programming. It usually takes only one good story to keep current programming in place. It’s also possible that some church leaders would rather not measure the effectiveness of current programming. As long as they stay off the scale (and wear their stretchy pants), they can keep telling themselves that everything is just fine.
CrossFit’s success is not built upon a random person at a CrossFit gym mysteriously losing a bunch of weight and getting in great shape while everyone else stays the same. It’s success is based on the evidence that measurable transformation is the norm in a CrossFit gym. Transformation is expected, explainable, and repeatable.
It would not diminish the power of the Holy Spirit or take away from the mysterious wonder of the gospel to establish spiritual fitness structures in churches that encourage measurable transformation in expected, explainable, and repeatable ways.
But all of this assumes that the majority of those attending churches expect to be transformed. Maybe the reason we’re not more concerned with measuring our transformation is that transformation is no longer an expected outcome of the gospel in many churches. We’ll save this possibility for a future post.
Telling Stories, Asking Questions, Learning Lessons
You should look at the empirical literature of Positive Psychology where they have devised a variety of measures and strategies to measure the virtues. Psychologists measure this stuff all the time. It’s what we do: Quantify psychological and behavioral variables.
Richard–thanks so much for stopping by the blog. It is an honor. I love the stuff you do on your blog.
Any suggestions as to where to start regarding Positive Psychology?
Also, can you envision a church or spiritual formation group using some form of survey/instrument to measure growth in Christlikeness?
My goal here is not prove who is the most Christlike, but rather to use measurement as a way of motivating continued growth.
Here are a couple of ideas:
1. You might want to look at Todd Hall’s Spiritual Transformation Inventory and its support materials: http://drtoddhall.com/index.php/spiritual-assessment/
2. For a quick tour of Positive Psychology read Martin Seligman’s Authentic Happiness: http://www.amazon.com/Authentic-Happiness-Psychology-Potential-Fulfillment/dp/0743222989/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1312315067&sr=8-1
Inside AH you’ll find example items of the VIA Survey of Character Strengths. Many of the Character Strengths align with the Fruits of the Spirit and the virtue lists from the Christian tradition. You can take the entire survey at Seligman’s website to get a feel for it and to see your scores on the virtues (note: registration required to take the survey): http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx
These first two ideas are based on self-report, which is limited. For example, how do you measure humility with self-report? Tricky.
So…
3. Moving past self-report you might want to try something more behavioral, like self-monitoring. For example, for my doctoral research on anger management we had subjects walk around with a small diary where they collected data on their anger episodes. They would note the situational context (the trigger) and then use a quick ruler scheme to note the severity and duration of the anger episode. Procedures like this are used to track all sorts of treatment outcome variables from smoking to diet control to panic attacks. Using this procedure we could track the baseline frequency, severity, and duration of the person’s anger issues. After our intervention we could then monitor how we affected those baseline measures. Basically, you could use something like this to track a wide variety of spiritual formation targets.
4. If you really want to get past the self-report you can have third-party individuals rate you. Perhaps privately. At the start of a year you have, perhaps, friends, family and co-workers rate you on some target variable. These ratings are not revealed. A year later you are assessed again and your “change score” is revealed to you. Maybe it’s a +7 on kindness. Hopefully not a -7.
And so on. The key idea here is simply taking the logic of treatment outcome and applying it to spiritual formation. Set a goal. Use a strategy to assess a baseline. Undergo the time of intervention. Reassess. Repeat.
5. There are also a host of observable variables that can also be assessed. Income given away. Number of people fed, visited, clothed. Just count the “cups of cold water” given in Jesus’ name.
Stepping back, I’d like to see more churches move in the direction you are talking about. Shift adult bible classes to virtue formation groups. Instead of “teachers” we have “virtue coaches,” people nominated from within the body as exemplars of a particular virtue. Members of each coaching team met to set goals, assess themselves and each other, form accountability networks, and then undergo a season (weeks to months) of training in a particular, targeted virtue. Members could then rotate through various classes aimed at different Fruits of the Spirit. I might start with patience and then move on to the gentleness class/intervention. You get the idea.
Boom!!!
That’s what I’m talking about!
Thanks Richard.
To add onto my thoughts from the previous thread…. I think it would be good to take an attribute of love like, say, patient, think of situations where your patience is pushed or ceases to be patience and turns ugly, and measure your growth within the context of that situation. You could get your baseline and regular checkups from something like dinner time with the whole fam. while you’re sitting next to your 2 year old son. Hypothetically speaking of course!
there is a study by willow creek that showed that church programs don’t do much for spiritual formation: http://www.revealnow.com/about.asp