Hillsong Church Indicators of Church Health

With 68 services in 28 locations, Hillsong Church knows a thing or two about church health and growth.

During the last Hillsong Leadership Network Online Open Week, Pastor Joel A’bell lead a session titled “Indicators of Church Health,” and shared the five gauges they use to assess the health of their church.

We’ll share these five gauges with you, but before we do, it’s important to understand what gauges are and what they are not.

Why Focus on Metrics?

Gauges or dashboards allow you to display your metrics and create great conversation for how to move forward in your church. (Learn more about Church Metrics, a free app that helps you track and  view your church data.)

Metrics aren’t something to fear.

In order to grow, you must know where you currently are.

Think about driving your car somewhere you’ve never been. If you enter a destination into your GPS, will you won’t arrive there until you first enter your starting location.

Metrics give you a starting location.

Two Questions to Ask Yourself

As a church leader, you must be able to answer:

• Where am I now?
• Where am I going?

Then, with both of these questions answered, you can determine the best route to take to reach your goal. Remember, you can’t put a roadmap down if there’s no origin.

Using Gauges to Guide You

Again, go back to the last time you drove. Chances are, you didn’t even know it, but as you were moving forward, you were able to view all the important gauges and make adjustments without really taking our eyes off the road. You glanced down to notice your speed, oil pressure, if your lights were on, but none of that prohibited you from proceeding on your route.

Monitoring your gauges allowed you to continue moving forward.

As you set up dashboards and gauges, they’ll allow you to ensure everything’s running smoothly as you proceed to your goal.

Hillsong Church’s Five Gauges

In their training, which you can watch free on the Life.Church Open Network, Pastor Joel shares the five gauges that Hillsong Church uses to measure church health.

1. Attendance. When looking at year-over-year growth, Hillsong aims to be 7% higher in attendance than the week before. Why 7%? Hear Pastor Joel explain why.
   Watch the training
2. New people. New attenders and new believers have a unique discipleship track and follow-up process. Hillsong Church follows up with new attenders and new believers over a three-month process, with the first seven days being critical.For their dashboard, they track the percentage of new people that respond to their follow-up. If 10 were new, and only three responded, that’s a 30% response rate. What’s their ideal response rate? View the free training, “Indicators of a Healthy Church.”
3. Connect groups. Church happens in community, so the number of small groups—called Connect Groups by Hillsong—is an important indicator for their church growth.
4. Volunteer ratio. Great volunteers serve and care for attenders. The ratio of volunteers to attenders is important to Hillsong Church, which aims for a ratio of 1:7. That means every one volunteer is providing care for seven attenders. As the second number gets higher, the less healthy your church will be.
5. Giving. As you know, our churches won’t run without giving, but keeping track of this number is more than that. Giving from attenders allows us to see spiritual growth and maturity in our congregations. By setting a per person giving number—dividing total giving by total attendance—HIllsong Church is able to track how their individual campuses are doing in leading through generosity.

Get More Training from the Hillsong Leadership Network

If you liked this training from the Hillsong Leadership Network, you have two chances to view more.

• Attend the Hillsong Leadership Network Online Open Week. View over 25 trainings Sept. 5-8 from Hillsong leadership on topics like self leadership, ministering to millennials, the ideation of creative elements, and more.

• View more Hillsong training. Trainings like “The Myth of a Cool Church,” “Creativity on a Shoestring Budget,” and “Developing Others” are available for free on the Open Network.