Should the Church be SMART or organic? A recent Church Times article rails against episcopal managerialism and sets its sights on “targets” as the problem. In this week’s NumbersMatters I want to say why we need SMART targets now more than ever.
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In her article “Management and mission… ” from the Church Times October 27 (Available here) Canon Alison Milbank argues that “The parish is a form of organic life….that is resistant to targets”. The article is part of a general push back against perceived controlling management within the Church of England. This management is associated with “The denigration of the parish and the deliberate development of a competitive structure of ‘new worshipping communities'”. She particularly identifies that “The problem lies with the functionalism of SMART goals.
For those who might have missed out on this particular acronym, SMART means Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Resourced, and Timed. And that is why this becomes a matter of church statistics. I am not writing here to support the management structure of the Church of England. God no. I am writing to explain why I think we need to be SMARTer – particularly in these times.
I have to confess an affection for SMART. Canon Milbank may want to dismiss it as irredeemably secular and maybe somewhat outdated, but for me it is a term which has proved persistently useful in parish life. For me being SMART is an antidote to a certain wooliness of thinking as we respond to our current context and plan for the future. I have used SMART objectives, explicitly or implicitly, in every significant project I undertook as an incumbent.
Jesus had things to say about SMART objectives. He talked about counting the cost of discipleship (another term which Canon Milbank critiques). Jesus compared the cost of discipleship to building a tower or going to war (Luke 14v25ff). He said – work out the cost, establish whether you have the resources. And yes, the cost of discipleship is everything, another metric we might want to overlook in assessing our spiritual lives.
Simply put, being SMART is thinking scientifically rather than optimistically or magically. It does not rule out the miraculous, but majors in the ordinariness. It does not rule out hope or faith because every church project is an exercise in hope and faith … and love. We think that a church project has potential. We assess what that potential needs to look like. We make sure the project has what we think it needs in order to flourish. Then we set it on its way.
It is not that different from planting a vegetable garden? My partner and I plant one every year. We ( well actually she) thinks about what we hope to grow in the garden, and when we expect the plants to hit certain targets. We make sure the plants have the sun and soil and water and support they need. If the vegetables aren’t growing, or producing flowers, or fruiting at the right time, then we rethink our strategy. This year our tomatoes, planted in a new location exceeded our expectations with a bountiful harvest.
I would go so far as to say that being SMART can address the denial that seems to occur in some quarters of the church. The kind of denial which says either “everything is fine” or “what’ll be will be”. The kind of denial that insists we should keep on doing “what we always done”…. or even go back to “How it was” before Covid. That denial exists at every level in the church, and in every denomination and nation that I have encountered. Without SMART targets we don’t know if we have achieved what we hoped – in a sense we aim at nothing in particular…. and then we don’t know if we hit it.
A local church is planning to hold a wine and cheese social event after their Christmas eve service. Knowing their minister I guess that he has established some SMART objectives for this event. It will not just be a fundraiser – though I think they will have some figures that they hope to achieve. Their objectives might include the number of regular members of the congregation who attend, the proportion of the Christmas eve congregation who go to the social, and the number of non-members of the congregation who attend both service and social. They might compare the attendance this year with previous years. They will be thinking SMART.
This is not the mechanistic mission which Canon Milbank is opposed to. For every attender at the Christmas event there will be a story of God at work. The organic growth is the development of those stories, the ways in which God shapes the lives of individuals and communities. SMART objectives provide milestones in those stories, benchmarks in the spiritual growth. SMART objectives remind us to work in partnership with God, to steward our little corner of creation and our part of God’s flock.
I have been doing work with the Pentecostal Church of Canada who have interesting SMART objectives. In their annual congregational statistics (available here) they collect numbers that are fundamental to their sense of mission: How many people were converted? How many baptised in water? How many baptised in the Spirit? These numbers keep the Pentecostal Church on track to fulfill its sense of mission. They are metrics which reflect the values and beliefs of the church and denomination. They may seem unusual to those otside the denomination but they make perfect sense. I wish Anglicans could agree on
I believe that being truly SMART in these times is the way we need to go. We need to be SMART as we carry out experiments in being church in these times. Fresh expressions, new worshipping communities, assorted forms of lay and ordained leadership, all of these are experiments. Like any experiment they need to be measured and assessed. That is what being SMART does. It requires that the project is set up properly and monitored. It requires that resources are provided and support given. It requires that assessment is done, and done well.
My experience, and the experiences of some who have talked to me, is that the church is often not SMART enough. It pays lip service to targets and then defaults to how it feels about a project. Dioceses put effort into setting up objective standards and then decide that the standards aren’t what really mattered. They forget to do the monitoring or to maintain the resourcing. They run out of steam or get excited about something else. Or they decide that a project isn’t ‘working’ when the benchmarks have not actually been assessed properly.
This has been a somewhat passionate posting because this subject gets to the heart of why this blog exists – to promote a SMARTer church, more ready to address the challenges we are facing in the 21st century.
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