Winning in Church

Ray had just left the baseball mound after throwing the opening pitch...a strike. His new friend asks him, "When is the last time you left a church service or a meeting feeling the way you did when you left that mound just now? When's the last time you won at church?"

How do you define a "win" for a church? The concept (and above story) is coming from "7 Practices of Effective Ministry" by Stanley, Joiner, Jones. The first practice is defining what a win looks like. For a sports team a win is defined as who had the most points at the end of the game. For a sports team owner a win may not just defined as winning the game, but also the number of fans that show up and/or how the team worked together.

One of our tasks last night at our PESC meeting was to try and define what a win looks like for our team (I was on the Family Life team consisting of Young Adults, Cell Groups, Mens/Womens Ministry, Discipleship & Education, Marriage & Family, and Ministry Matching). Trying to define a win that covers all of those is no easy task (it would be much easier to define a win for each individual one...but that was not the task).

We had some great discussion about this. A win needs to be measurable in some way or another. However, a win is not necessarily measured by numbers (such as the number of people involved), although I think it can be a valid measurement in some situations. Ultimatly we want to get people involved in bibical communities (ministries). But on top of getting involved, we want people to be living out God's calling in their life and be involved in a ministry where they can grow spiritually.

What are your thoughts on this? How would you define a "win" for various areas of the church such as "Worship", "Family Life", "Next Generation", etc?