Effective Evaluation Practices for the Church

Sarah Drummond, author of Holy Clarity: The Practice of Planning and Evaluation, offers evaluation practices for the church that have been effective in many settings. Her intention is to help churches clarify the purpose of their ministries and the intended outcomes. Too often churches continue program and practices by habit or tradition, rather than asking the hard questions, "Why are we doing this?" and "What change do we expect?"

Drummond suggests that those who are evaluating ongoing church programming begin by creating a "Condition/Intervention Diagram".  In a circle place the "condition" to which a program is responding. In the next step, list how the church program responds to that condition. Finally, ask the question, did the response change the condition?

For example, in 2008, dental professionals from Brighton First and the community wanted to address the local condition of people not being able to afford health care. The church's response was to remodel a building on our campus for use as a low cost community dental clinic. Currently, members of Brighton First volunteer at the VINA Dental Clinic. Did the response change the condition it addressed? Today, over 1,000 patients call VINA their dental home. Dental health has improved in Livingston County.

The Condition/Intervention Model of evaluation
answers the questions  "Why do we do what we do?".

This process names the "Why" of our church programming. Brighton First can bring this evaluation practice to any program that we do: What condition does this program address? How are we responding to or or what is our intervention? Does our response change the condition?

Drummond's second evaluation tool is the "Logic Model". This process lays out what needs to happen for a church to meet its goals, taking into account several factors that lead to the hoped-for change in a condition. (page 60)

The Logic Model begins with a question that helps planners to list indicators of success. For example, "If our program did everything it hoped to do, what would success look like five years int he future?" Once indicators are listed, planners turn to a question of impact, "If that is the change we hope to see, what would need to happen first?" Those who are planning keep asking that same question as they move through the topics of outputs, inputs, and resources. (page 61)

The third model Drummond suggests, "Stakeholder Mapping", encourages planners to determine the major stakeholders in any program. If the "Condition/Intervention Diagram" helps to answer the question "why" and the "Logic Model" helps to clarify the "how" of a program, then Stakeholder Mapping helps planners to answer the question "Who cares?". Determining who is effected by church programming, allows for more effective evaluation.

The fourth and final piece of evaluation is data collection. However, without doing the first three steps of evaluation above, church and program leaders may not be collecting data that is relevant. Even the methods for collecting data cannot be determined until leaders know what they seek to know about the program.

Drummond writes that these models are not "hard and fast" rules and should be adapted to a church's context.