Who sets the standard for determining if your Sunday worship experience was on target? Who are the best people to ask about your service if you are serious about evaluating what you have done (and I hope you are very serious about it, otherwise why did you invest the time and resources to do it)?
My opinion is that the best evaluation is from the people you are trying to connect with at your service–your target audience. Sure, staff members and volunteers will have opinions and they should be encouraged to voice them. But when it really counts, when you are ready and willing to make significant changes if needed, what is the best source of information on how well your service met the expectations of your target audience?
Some of the technically trained planters are thinking that it is impossible to get a reasonable random sample from visitors that comprise your target. I agree, that would be very difficult for a church plant, especially one that starts small. So why not just default to staff and volunteer opinions? In my opinion, the stakes are too high not to ask people who are your actual target.
If your church plant is externally focused, you realize how critical it is to make the right first time impression on someone who has never been to church or is back for the first time in many years. We may only have one shot and it better be good.
So how do you get feedback from that unchurched guy? Aren’t you likely to run him off by asking some questions? In fact you will run him off if you do it wrong, but we still have to try. LifeBridge has had some favorable results with using simple and brief evaluation forms. We even use Google forms links within emails sent to people that we identified as new guests who might meet our target. We also try to verify they are our target from people we believe invited them.
We know it is not scientific but we have learned from this feedback and it has been important for us in making course corrections in several areas. Will we miss something, sure. Will we make a mistake, that is guaranteed. But we can rest knowing that we have tried every thing we know to do to understand how our target audience feels about our service.
We prefer to make mistakes trying to understand our target instead of making mistakes by guessing what our target thinks based on our church experience (which is usually corrupted).
What about you? What kinds of mistakes are you willing to make to know that your Sunday service will connect with the people you are trying to reach?
