I am a baseball fan. I have been a baseball fan ever since my grandfather and I watched the game of the week on Saturdays in the 1970s on TV. We saw the mighty red machine from Cincinnati, the New York Yankees, The Oakland A’s with Catfish Hunter and Vida Blue, and many others. It wasn’t until the late 70’s that I became a Texas Rangers fan. I have followed them through many bad seasons and a few good ones. I celebrated with them when they won the World Series in 2023.
This year, I am hopeful as we approach the second half of the season. Although we currently have a losing record, we are still ahead in the Silver Boot rivalry between the Houston Astros and us. Who knows, maybe we can improve and take it all the way to the playoffs again, and even to the infamous World Series.
One thing I have noticed about baseball, especially the Rangers in recent years, is that they have a desire to improve. They want to get better. They have traded for better pitching and fielding. They have a desire to succeed.
As I have thought about succeeding in baseball, I have also thought about succeeding in church life. I have even wondered how we measure whether we are succeeding by pursuing God’s plan for our church or not.
According to the Southern Baptist Convention, one way we chronicle our history and success is through the Annual Church Profile, or ACP. Your church will receive emails in the coming weeks, asking you to fill out a profile. You will be asked about your church’s attendance, baptisms, financial receipts, and missions. This information helps the convention track its growth, whether our churches are seeing people come to know Christ, and determines how many messengers your church can send to the National Convention. This information can also be compiled into a multi-year study showing a pattern of how the church has performed over time.
While this information is important, I believe there is an additional step we should take. This step has been popularized by the book Church Unique. In it, the author discusses identifying what makes your church unique among thousands of others. It speaks to understanding your church’s unique, God-given mission. The author goes on to say that as a church develops its mission, it must also determine its measures of success. In baseball, it is referred to as wins and losses.
I have coached churches in determining their mission, values, strategy, and measures in pursuit of God’s unique plan. I have encouraged them to create tangible measures of success. For example, if a church values discipleship, it may want to set a percentage goal for how many of its congregation are involved in discipleship. If their strategy is to send people out to share the gospel, they may desire that the whole church share their faith with at least three people each year, or they could create a collective goal of 1,000 to 10,000 gospel conversations for the year. If going on mission trips is part of their strategy, they may set a goal of having 25% of the congregation involved in missions each year. In all these cases, the church prayerfully sets a goal that will achieve what it has determined is essential for its pursuit.
Thom Rainer, using a baseball term, speaks to the fact that churches that succeed or are revitalized have developed a scorecard. They are asking questions. How can we improve? How can we make more disciples and measure our success? How can we send more people into the world to reach our goals and know when we have achieved success? How can we train more leaders and determine when we have achieved success? In Rainer’s mind, these kinds of questions and answers will result in a scorecard that will help a church become what it is called to be.
In church and professional baseball, scores are kept to determine wins and losses. In my mind, I am rooting for the Texas Rangers to have more wins than losses. In my mind, I am rooting for our Denton Baptist Associational churches to grow. They can do that by developing goals or measures and then pursuing them for kingdom expansion in the North Texas area. Take time as we approach the fall to examine your mission as a church, to develop God-ordained goals, and then pursue them, experiencing the success that comes with achieving a God-driven, winning season.