Church Evaluation: The Story We Tell Ourselves

Depending on our disposition, our church evaluation may be too optimistic or too skeptical. Either way, we rarely know why we see what we do.

By Clint Grider

Is it possible that your evaluation of your church is not as accurate as you think? 

All pastors, just like all people, are afflicted with confirmation bias. We apply unconscious assumptions about what we already believe to the myriad of people we see from the platform—many as opaque as a brick wall if we’re honest—and propose a theory to make sense of what we’re seeing.

“All pastors, just like all people, are afflicted with confirmation bias.” — @clintgrider Share on X

Bias toward optimism

Some church leaders have a bias toward optimism. They’re inclined to see things as rosier than they actually are when they observe their church. If participant numbers are going up, a leader who leans toward optimism might say, “Things are good! God is blessing us!” even if they have no idea whether or not the crowd is becoming more Christlike. If their positive outlook is called into question, they may spotlight a few individual success stories of conversion and spiritual growth to validate their bias.

False impressions of spotlighting

We should remember, however, that spotlighting is inherently misleading. Success stories alone are never a representative sample of the whole. It’s like an advertisement that shows people who lost a hundred pounds on a diet plan. But in tiny print at the bottom of the screen are the words “results not typical.”

A thought experiment bears this out. Imagine that you pastor a church with 500 in weekend attendance. Every Sunday for a year, you put a different person on the platform to share how their life has been changed through the ministry of your church. The cumulative weight of all these testimonies would leave a powerful impression that amazing things are happening in the church. And in the lives of the testifiers, they truly would be.

But if your church has 500 in attendance, the year of testimonies would highlight barely more than 10% of the body (and if your people only attend twice a month on average, the testimonies would only highlight 5% of the total). In other words, for a year, it might appear that the next Great Awakening was breaking out in your church, yet based on what you actually know, 9 in 10 could be totally untouched by it. 

"Spotlighting is inherently misleading. Success stories alone are never a representative sample of the whole.” — @clintgrider Share on X

Are you evaluating your church’s effectiveness by the 10% who are testifying to a changed life or by the 90% who aren’t? 

Bias toward skepticism

Other church leaders have a bias toward skepticism. They have a basic doubt that they can really know what’s going on in people. So even if numbers are rising some, they can’t shake the concern that things aren’t what they seem. And spotlighted success stories, while appreciated, offer little lasting comfort given the larger concern.

Skepticism, however, is no solution when doubt isn’t based on any more evidence than the optimist’s hope is. Even if skeptical leaders are right that things aren’t as solid as they appear, why are they right? Skeptical leaders rarely take the next step to investigate below the surface to see what’s really going on. That might be the case because they don’t know how. But it also might be because it seems more spiritual and orthodox to say, “Only God knows the human heart,” shrug, and leave it at that.

Fundamental attribution error

Whether we lean toward optimism or skepticism or swing back and forth between the two, it’s easy to explain our observations with a story that fits our expectations. If things are going well, it’s because God is moving or because we’re committed to ministry excellence or because we’re warm and friendly or because we’re faithful to the gospel. If things aren’t going well, it’s because of the competition of youth sports or because people prioritize other things during the summer or because the younger (or older) generation isn’t committed or because our volunteers aren’t willing to do enough. 

In general, when good things happen, even if some of us are quick to say “to God alone be the glory,” we think it has to do with the leaders. When we aren’t seeing the results we want, we think it has to do with the followers. This is an important example of the fundamental attribution error, which describes how, due to our biases, we have an erroneous “tendency to attribute another’s actions to their character…while attributing [our own] behavior to external situational factors outside of [our] control.”

“When good things happen, we think it has to do with the leaders. When we aren’t seeing the results we want, we think it has to do with the followers.” — @clintgrider Share on X

Deeper evaluation

Depending on our disposition, we might focus our casual evaluation optimistically on the 10% who testify to a changing life or skeptically on the 90% who don’t. But either way, we rarely know why we see what we see. All we have are some general figures and a few anecdotes. While those data are better than nothing, it’s all too easy to spin them into a tale to explain what’s happening with little evidence to support it. 

Seeing separate problems as having separate causes is the natural way most of us think because it’s the easiest way to think. But that doesn’t make it the right way to think. Our churches are complex, integrated systems—whatever you see happening in one place, good or bad, is almost guaranteed to be related to someone or something else that at first seems totally unrelated. But unless you do real evaluation at a deeper level, you’ll never see it.

For permission to republish this article, contact Marissa Postell Sullivan.

Adapted and excerpted with permission from Mind the Gap by Clint Grider. Copyright 2023, B&H Publishing.