Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:00 Well, it's that time of year again, it's the time where we take a look at everything that happened in the past year and take a look at everything we want to see happen in 2022. And then we start setting goals. This episode is dedicated to helping you set great goals for your church. In 2022, we hope this conversation helps you reach more people and grow. This is the retried podcast.
Speaker 0 00:00:32 You're listening to the retrial podcast. The show dedicated to helping pastors and church leaders reach people the right way, hosted by me, Thomas Costello, and with me as always is my cohost Ian Hyatt. We're here to help your church see more visitors and grow.
Speaker 2 00:00:54 I'm ready to get.
Speaker 0 00:00:59 Hey guys, welcome to the reach right podcast episode number 78. I am your host Thomas Castello. And with me as always is my co-host
Speaker 3 00:01:07 Ian Hyatt. What's up
Speaker 0 00:01:08 Thomas. Hey, not too much, man. Excited to, uh, to talk about our topic today, we're gonna be talking about a pastor's guide to church goal setting. Uh, that's the theme here today. I think that's important. Uh, first of all, um, it was a good Christmas for you and your family. I, uh, I assume we don't know, cause this is before Christmas when we're filming this here right now. We're not
Speaker 3 00:01:30 Getting faith that it was good.
Speaker 0 00:01:32 Yes, yes. And faith, no family issues I have in-laws coming in, but that's uh, I love my in-laws and so it's all good.
Speaker 3 00:01:40 Perfectly happy.
Speaker 0 00:01:41 Yeah, absolutely. My wife, my wife loved I, my wife loved what I got her. It was so great. She was thrilled. She said I was the best husband ever. Uh, speaking all prophetically. We believe that's going to be the choice here. So anyway, we're filming this right before Christmas here, but uh, we're going to be taking the week off here next week, but uh, hope you and your families out there had a really great Christmas, good time with family. And you had great Christmas Eve services at church there and
Speaker 3 00:02:08 All of that.
Speaker 0 00:02:09 Absolutely. Right. This is that time of year though, that we take a real hard look, uh, at, uh, what happened last year. What's coming in the year to come and we start getting into goal setting. And we do that personally. Are you a, are you a resolution center personally?
Speaker 3 00:02:24 I am. But you know, I'm glad when we, when we kinda decided to do this podcast and I saw this, I was like, it refreshed me in the need to do it. I actually used to really sit down and do it a lot better than I do now. And I, you know, and I put together a document and, and, and I'll do a lot of this. I would do a lot of this stuff. We're going to talk about today, uh, in this, but I actually kind of dropped the ball at, you know, I guess a lot of people dropped the ball with certain things in 2020. Um, so I guess the goal was for a more normal year in 2021. Uh, but, uh, so I think, but this refresh me, I was like, I'm going to sit down and do this again. Yeah. So, yeah.
Speaker 0 00:03:03 Yeah, it's good. I, I do, um, like I, we serve, I personally, I, for our business, we do all kinds of goals and you, and I talk about that and you know, about those things for my family. I certainly, we set out our annual budget, which is kind of like our goal setting for the year and those things. And then I usually have a personal goal or two, like, so last year I failed miserably. It was about, I had kind of committed to, to reading a book a month, which was good for me. Like that would be a good pace for me. I know some of our audience probably read a book like three books a week or something like that, or, or that's, child's play to a lot of them. But to me that would be huge. I think I made it through like five books this year.
Speaker 0 00:03:45 So, uh, fell behind on that. So not I'm a man enough to admit that, I guess, but this year I have some health goals. You and I have been talking about some of my, uh, my workout routines and those things. So personally I think a lot of people get that. We know we set resolutions and I think most church leaders, we probably do this too. Like we do this for our churches and what we want to see, God do some of the things we want to have happen, who we want to see grow some of the numerical goals that we're looking at. Uh, so I think that's really a healthy thing to do. So today I wanted to take some time. And in our conversation, we're going to talk out a few of the tricks, I guess, that we've learned, uh, to get more mileage out of your church goal setting, to be able to actually have it be useful to you.
Speaker 0 00:04:30 How often do we set resolutions? Like, it's, it's a famous idea that the average new year's resolution is broken within two weeks of years, right? Like, so it's like the same thing I'm sure is true for churches, that the average goal that we set, we kind of get off track of it after a, after a few weeks or here. So how do we get the most out of these goals and how they're not just the bad thing is that becomes discouraging, right? If you have this thing over your head, you have it maybe written out somewhere that we're going to do this. And then it just is a constant discouragement to you. How do you actually turn it into something that is, that is helpful for you going forward there? So that's what we hope to uncover, I think today with this conversation.
Speaker 3 00:05:10 Absolutely. And I'll go ahead and kick it off if you don't mind, actually like this was the first one, I think the first step before you plan your goals is to revisit last year's goals. Right? So I mean, you know, and I've done this before, where I looked at, what did I fail at? You know, what did I achieve? Um, because obviously if you failed at something, uh, you, you need to have that same goal again, or you need to kind of, you know, figure out why did I fail that? Where did I get off track? And, uh, and then I think that just helps you understand what other, and maybe if you crushed your goals, you need to have new and more challenging goals. Right. So, yeah, absolutely. So it's good to evaluate it to, to know where to go. Yeah,
Speaker 0 00:05:49 Yeah, yeah. I think it's a double-edged thing. Like I think that the most common thing is that you take a look at your goals and you do quite what you had hoped. Uh, and so it probably gives you either, it refreshes you to say, Hey, you know, I could have done it. I just didn't really work hard enough. But I think in a lot of cases, it helps us to, to reshape like what is a more realistic goal for me? Like, so, you know, if you look at yourself and you say, you know, I'm 50 pounds overweight. So my goal for this year is to, to be 50 pounds lighter. Well, you know, that's a pretty big undertaking, right? Ideally that would be great. Everybody would love that, but to drop 50 pounds at a year, that's a pretty big. So what if you said, Hey, I, that was just a discouragement to me, right?
Speaker 0 00:06:31 I'm going to instead focus on losing 15 pounds this year and have something. If I can lose a pound a month or something like that, then I'll know that I'm doing well with the same thing goes for your church. I think if you have certain goals and you didn't get anywhere near them last year, and Lord knows, there were so many reasons for why we didn't hit our goals. Last year, we all had hoped that the pandemic after the, the, we had hoped that the vaccines would help us get over a lot of that there and still there's all kinds of things weighing us down. And, uh, church attendance has gotten back up to like, like a fraction of where it was before for most churches. And so there's all kinds of reasons why we maybe didn't hit our goals. But I think just helping you with this year's perspective, have a new, honest assessment on that is really gonna be helpful.
Speaker 0 00:07:14 And then like you said, you're exactly right. If you, if you blew your goals out, you need to really hit hard and, and you know, really dream big and prayerfully ask God, Hey, what can we accomplish this year? How many people can we reach for Christ? How many people can we see in the seats? How much, uh, how many ties and offerings we'll receive those kinds of things. I think that's really to challenge yourself in some of those areas. It's going to be really good. Yeah. That's awesome. Thanks. You can tackle the next one. Yeah. Next one is they must be measurable. They must be measurable. We are all about measurement here at retreat. That's really something that we think that every like very few churches measure enough, I would say, and we talk to churches all the time. We're we work obviously in the field of digital marketing.
Speaker 0 00:07:59 And that is the huge advantage that digital marketing has over. All of the other forms of marketing is you can measure every single bit of it and put your dollars into where they get the best results used to be with our marketing. Everything was kind of blind. So we'll send out a church, a mailer, and you know, how many people see it, how many we can tell how many people it gets delivered to, but what kind of impact it makes and how many people looked at it, how long they held it in their hands, what they did with it afterwards, that's all just guesswork, right? Whereas with an add on, on social media or a Google ad, we know exactly how many times it gets shown. How many times people click on it, how long they stay on our site when they do click on it, what they do on our site, when they click on it.
Speaker 0 00:08:42 And so we can, we can measure all of those kinds of things there. So we are big about measuring all that to say, you should be measuring lots of stuff, but when it comes to your goals, I think a goal is not a goal. If it's not something measurable. So if you say, Hey, we want to have our church, uh, we want a renewed or a refreshing in our heart for prayer as a church. Yeah. There's nothing wrong with that statement. I'm not coming against that. I think that's great. Say those things, but don't mistake thinking that that is a goal. That's not actually a goal. That's a wish. Uh, and that's a hope and maybe it's some of the holy spirit, maybe that would be speaking that to you, that you want to be focusing on prayer, but a way that you would write that out as a goal is you'd say, Hey, I want to see an average of 15 people in our weekly prayer meeting over the course of this year, which would be a doubling of where we are right now, which would indicate a refreshed movement of God when it comes to prayer here.
Speaker 0 00:09:39 So find ways to, to make anything that you feel like God wants you to do, find ways to make those kinds of things measurable, put some numbers on it. So you could actually look back at it next year and not just be stuck, looking at it like, well, you know, did we, did we do better on prayer? Did we see a refreshing in prayer? I mean, it's easy to deceive ourselves or easy to discourage ourselves, depending on your personality. If you just look at it without a number with a number, you know, the saying is that numbers don't lie, right. Can actually measure these kinds of things. Yeah,
Speaker 3 00:10:09 That's it. I like that you say put a number on it because I think it's easy for pastors and ministry leaders to just say, well, we'll know that we're growing in prayer. If people show up at our prayer gatherings and we can, we can tell if it was a good turnout or not just by the people that we see there. But even if, even if you had two more people show up at them than you did last year, that's growth. Right. So that's why it's good to track that. Even if it's two more people. Okay, well, we did something right. There was never something to measure there. So I think that's good. Cause it's easy to just say it's easy to not put a number on and it's easy to just say, well, we see it everyday. We see, we see how many empty seats are. We see how many people showed up at our monthly baptisms if it's baptism tracking, but it really is good to measure that. Absolutely. Yup. Yup.
Speaker 0 00:10:56 I think it's especially valuable when you are doing that. Revisiting, we talked about a number of one is that to revisit a goal where it says, you know, get better at prayer, you know? Well, it's kinda hard. How did we do? I don't know. We, we did. Okay. I feel good. I feel bad. I don't know how it is. So it's really valuable when you're taking stock and you're resetting goals for next year and that's where over years and five years and 10 years, you'll be able to really look back and say, look at what the Lord has done in this area and the impact that we've made and the growth that we've seen in people's prayer lives because we started measuring. It sounds good.
Speaker 3 00:11:33 That's good. I'll get the next one. Let your leaders set their own goals. I really liked this one because, uh, I think most pastors and ministry leaders know now that it's good to delegate things. It's good to let, uh, leaders take ownership of their areas of ministry. That's not to say that you're still not, uh, the primary leader as a senior pastor or anything like that, but I think they need to have their own goals because if I see them set their own, if I don't, if I'm the one setting, all the goals, I don't know how much they're really into it or bought in or, you know, so if they set their own goals, well, that shows not only do they care, but it gives you something to measure and compare to your own. Cause. Cause I know every senior pastor is they do have some sort of a goal for each area of ministry in their church.
Speaker 3 00:12:21 Right. So, um, so there's going to be an understanding of big picture that a pastor has for all of that. But when, when leaders set their own goals, Hey, not only are you delegating and you're giving them the ability to lead after all, they're a leader, right. You've called them. You've, you're paying them and they've been called to be a leader, let them take some ownership of it. And, and also we'll just, I think that when it says so much, it's it shows how much they care. Um, maybe they have some goals that you didn't even think of that are dynamite. Right. So,
Speaker 0 00:12:51 Absolutely. I would hope so. Yeah. I'm going to confess to this a couple things here is that, um, this is a hard one for me, right? Because I lead I've led churches. I've planted a church and pastored a church. And uh, I I've led this organization for six years now and it's uh, uh, I struggle because I have all these things that I want to see in our organization. And it's something that I feel like I can offer a lot of insight and I have my own goals for what other people within our organization do, what our designers do and what our Google grant managers do and the kind of results they can see. It's challenging for me. But here here's something that I've learned is that, and this is, this might sound harsh. If you don't trust the people that are setting your, like to set their own goals, people to set their own goals, they probably aren't good enough to be on your team in the first place.
Speaker 0 00:13:44 Like if this person, if they're not smart enough or you feel like they're not capable enough to do that. And it's not to say, you probably gotta look inward as to why that is. I think in most cases, it's your own trust issues and problems that you have there. But realistically, if people are qualified to be running these areas of ministry or an organization running areas of helping churches, then we need to be willing to trust them, to set their own goals. Now here's what you'll run into though. And so sometimes I, as I stretch myself and we do this in our organization, sometimes someone comes to me and they set their goals and they just don't quite align with what our company goals are like. So I know you, you're the director of sales here at retried. And so if you tell me and say, Hey, we're going to start get one new church every month started on something.
Speaker 0 00:14:31 Whereas now we get like, you know, 15 to 20 churches started every single month. So if you tell me that, like, I just want to w if you kind of move to something small like that, we'd have to have some kind of a corrective conversation about that. Right. And churches that'll be the same thing you're going to get. If you leave this to your team, I remember doing this. I had a, a person on my team once a, at a church. And they said kind of like that last goal we talked about, they said, we just really want to see a refreshment of fellowship within our church. Right. We want to earn our in my area of ministry, I want to see more fellowship taking place. And so that was a great thought. Yeah, I want more fellowship too. Those are good things, but I needed to kind of coach them.
Speaker 0 00:15:11 So I'm in this. We're not saying that you, um, we're not saying that it's smart to, to just move away and, and kind of not be involved with your team members goal setting, but just let them lead the process and let them, you need to kind of have an agreement on church goals. So your worship leader ask them, what is, what is your goal for this year? What do you want to see? What do you want to accomplish? What, what, how many new songs do you want to be adding in? Or like, let them come up with whatever their thing is, whatever that area is. Like I said, hopefully they have that in mind, right? And then you need to coach them on, Hey, here's what I want to see it as organization. So I think we need to revisit some of these goals and really make sure that they align with where our whole church is going there.
Speaker 0 00:15:54 So it's a tough kind of thing to craft a tough relational, a challenge for some people. But I really think it's important that you let other people set up goals in their specific areas of ministry. We need to be delegating and trusting people that way. That's good. That's good. Awesome. Next one is make them qualitative, not just quantitative. Uh, so there are a lot of traditional goals that I think are tried and true, but very much played out at this point. Right? So there's how many people showed up on our Sunday morning services. What was our total income? Uh, those kinds of numbers have been tracked for decades and they remain some of the most important numbers. But I think, especially in this time of whether you will kind of want to call it mid COVID, post COVID pandemic stuff, whatever it is, those numbers have been really hurtful.
Speaker 0 00:16:49 I think, to look at them for a lot of people, because the average church is down considerably in both of those two primary areas. Yep. And that's not to say just if we're down, we don't, we just changed the bar. We're not moving the goalpost is what we're saying, because we're, we're down for a year or two, but I think it is really important in this new time. We have to recognize that people are going to be experiencing church in new ways. They're going to experiencing the gospel in new ways. They're going to be watching online, more, engaging, more online, more. And so they have to be more tied to the quality of your ministry than just the quantity of your ministry. So things like ideas would be measuring how many hours are being served in the community or how many people invited a friend this year to church. Yeah. There's still, they still have to be measurable. Right. You still have to put a number on them. Hey, I want to see an average of one friend invited by every person in our church this year. That would be, uh, you know, that'd be a, uh, qualitative, it's still kind of a, it speaks to how much people like the church. They're a part of that. They're inviting their friends, how much they care about the great commission, those kinds of things. It's qualitative, but it's still measurable. Yeah. So that's what we're going for there. Yeah.
Speaker 3 00:18:01 I think that's really good because I mean, it's a step further than just the, like you said, the traditional thing or just a plain number. Um, so yeah, that's a great, um, next one is setting up benchmarks. So this is really important because we can sit down at the first of the year, make these goals and just kind of let them ride and not check back in on the goals. Right. So I think that's, uh, is the same reason why at our company, we look at things quarterly often, right? Uh, companies look at quarter, they have monthly goals, they have quarterly goals. Um, so you need to kind of look back and, and again, to prevent that a common thing that happens every year, like the reason why the gyms are full until February, uh, and then everyone's gone, uh, you know, I think that first quarter of your goals in the new year, you need to look at things really hard and say, Hey, here we are. We've kicked off for a few months. You know, are we hitting these goals? How far away are we from these goals? Um, and, and th that's going to help, you know, how to achieve your goals because you're gonna either kick it in gear, uh, what you need to stay in gear no matter what, but you know what I mean? You're going to know if you have to make some changes or something to help you hit your goals if you're not hitting them.
Speaker 0 00:19:18 Yeah. So let's say you set up a goal around number of new visitors that come to your church there. And so, yeah, I think it really is important that you're looking at them probably on like a monthly basis, I would say at least quarterly, but I'd say at the end of January, you need to set up a time, maybe an hour or so. Just put it in your calendar. Now on January 31st that I'm going to take a look at my goals that we set. And I'm going to take a look at those numbers. How many visitors did we see? How many, uh, what was our attendance? Like? What was our giving? How many hours were served in the community? How many people invited somebody, whatever those goals are that God puts on your heart, you need to be revisiting those really regularly for two reasons.
Speaker 0 00:19:56 One, it like, if you don't, if you just wait six months to look at it, those goals are useless for the back half of the year, because you're probably way off of them. And just, you're not keeping them top of mind there. And then two, it helps to encourage you if you're hitting them. If you, if your goal is to see a hundred new visitors come in the doors and you saw 10 in your first month, well, you're above pace in order to see the number of new visitors that you want to it's encouraging, and you can figure out, Hey, this has been really working this personal invitation strategy or these ads that we've been doing here have been really helping us a lot. And so you can start to work. Those kinds of things that are currently working and help you kind of keep moving forward with that. So, yeah. Benchmarks are
Speaker 3 00:20:35 Vital. That's good stuff. Why don't you lead us? Awesome.
Speaker 0 00:20:38 We'll do the last one is put them where others can see them. Yeah. This doesn't mean everything. It's not everybody. You don't like put them on the preaching podium. You're uh, you don't put them up front. They're like, so everybody can see what your goal is. It says, you know, uh, lead 75 people that Jesus this year and like this, anybody want to make a decision today? Look, we need to do ministry.
Speaker 3 00:21:01 How many people they're leading to Jesus. So you see a bill over here is killing it. He's the evangelism. Oh my gosh.
Speaker 0 00:21:07 You have what a great
Speaker 3 00:21:08 Idea. Children's pastor. I don't know. They're not doing anything Oregon.
Speaker 0 00:21:12 It's kind of like, never bring it. Anybody. She didn't lead anybody to Jesus for the last decade. It's not good. They kind of have a competitive spirit there at your office to see who, who wins the most. Right. So, no, I think what it is is you probably want your goals, just putting them out there, whatever God laid on your hearts and encourage this in all of your team members to whatever God's put on their hearts to put those out so that they're there for people to see so that when I walk into your office, for instance, he in, and I, I saw it, you know, that it'd be somewhere on a whiteboard or on your wall somewhere, you know, make it look something that you would be happy to look at, but it's just a good it's there, it's a reminder to you, but there is like that little bit of accountability that comes with it too.
Speaker 0 00:21:57 Just if you are totally falling short of what you hope to accomplish, that there is something that, you know, you're, you're accountable to those around you to actually get it done there. So that's the other thing that's really valuable. I know for me, here's what I do. My office is, uh, in this, this room here. So we have a separate unit at our house and that's where my office is. I know you have a home office too. I use sticky notes on my computer. Yeah. So on my desktop, there is a, like, not a lit, like a, a digital sticky note. And on that, it has all of our, our reach right goals for this year. We're going to have this many YouTube subscribers and this many podcasts downloads this much revenue and all that information is all in there every day. I see it. I kind of take a look and say, oh, what was our goal again? Okay. That's what the number is. And then all of my metrics are there and I can kind of see, Hey, how are we doing? Every time I log into YouTube, I'm looking at the YouTube subscriber count here and our goal there. And I have kind of benchmarks built in. So I don't know that really works for me, but I think having it displayed somewhere is really important.
Speaker 3 00:22:59 Yeah. Yeah. I have the white board and you and I have joked about it because when we do this video calls you, uh, you'll give me a hard time and say, look up to your right. Uh, and, uh, even though you can't see it, you know, where it's at on my wall. And, uh, and, and th you know, there's other digital forms of doing all of this, too. Of course, uh, we have digital forms for that in a digital marketing company. Uh, but, uh, but yeah, I think having that up there reminded me of the gym I work at too. I work out on like a small gym where there's maybe about like, it's out of someone's garage and there's no, there's maybe about 10 to 15 people that kind of work out there on a weekly basis, but they have a big whiteboard whiteboard up that, you know, we have like what we benched pressed that, uh, what our math was there, you know, what we did on, and then if someone has a certain other kind of goal it's written up there and it's, it's actually motivating.
Speaker 3 00:23:50 And I see a I'm like, oh man, I haven't done that in a while. All right. I think I can bench more than him. I need to get on that. So it's the same thing. And again, we know in church, uh, in ministry, you know, you gotta be careful with the competitive part of it, but there is some of that's healthy too, so you gotta balance it all out. And, uh, but I think the main thing that we said here is that put it up where we can all see them, because it's easy to forget these things as we've talked about this whole episode here. So
Speaker 0 00:24:16 Yeah. Yeah. My wife and I were just talking about this yesterday. We were talking about how the like, competition in church, on a staff in general is bad. That shouldn't be our motivation. It should be, uh, directed specifically towards Jesus. But then we started thinking about like, you know, we remembered times when we had interns and we encouraged interns to like, uh, to, to, to get the most done. There were multiple interns and they were all trying to get the most done or in youth group, I remember a common thing, maybe youth ministers that are listening to this out there, you've done this. We had this thing, like where, uh, whichever school we, we called it the battle of the bulge. And so we had like a cattle scale, uh, and whichever school brought the most weight in people. They won like pizza that night or something like that. So each high school would bring, they try to get the biggest kids at their school and try to get weight on the scale that they possibly could there. So whether you're a 90 pound girl, now, you don't even bother, no, we don't need you in our shirt. You don't matter,
Speaker 3 00:25:18 Men you're, then you're ready to
Speaker 0 00:25:20 Wear a lot of clothes and you can come, I guess. That's right. So anyway, so there, there is some place for it, I think. But yeah, I think that it's more, it's not so much to encourage competition, but just to have that out there for accountability and really for your own reminders sake, you want to be looking at these things as often as you possibly can. I know it's an encouragement to me. Uh, so yeah, hopefully to our audience, it's helpful too. Anything to add about goals as we close in.
Speaker 3 00:25:44 No, no, let's get on them. We encourage our audience and listeners get on them and, and, and we'll be praying for you to reach them.
Speaker 0 00:25:53 Yeah, that's it? Yeah. It's been great having you guys as part of our retried family here in 2021, that's our last episode. We will be catching you guys in the new year. Um, I'm believing for great things in our lives and our company. And I pray that for your churches too. Thank you guys so much for being a part of our retreat family. Uh, it does mean a lot to us. Uh, if this was helpful to you, we would really appreciate a subscription. If you want to subscribe to the podcast, whether that be on YouTube or wherever you get your audio podcasts there, rate, review, subscribe, do all those kinds of things. It does mean a lot to us. Uh, thanks so much for being a part of our retread family, happy new year, and we'll see you in 2022. Thanks for listening to the reach right podcast. We hope this episode will help you reach people the right way, looking for more resources for your church. Check us out online at studios.com. If this episode has been helpful to you, it would mean the world to us. If you would rate, review and subscribe on iTunes or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening. And we'll see you next week.
