Evaluating Worship and Music

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It was a simple question that came in the Q&A portion of a recent workshop. The woman stood and said, "My church started a contemporary worship service a few months ago. We converted our early Sunday morning service from traditional to contemporary and now we want to evaluate it. Other than attendance, how do we do that? How can we know if the contemporary service should continue?"

I was not prepared for the question, so I was unable to respond to it intelligently and helpfully. I had not been asked this question before; and in thinking about it, I suppose that most of us are content with using the two main measures of attendance and offering in the evaluation of the success of a worship service. If attendance is good or growing and if offerings are strong, then what else do we need to know? If those two measurements are positive, then surely any other means of measurement we might come up with would also be met.

Further consideration of the woman's question has led me to come up with other means of measuring the success of a worship service. It is important to distinguish between evaluating worship and evaluating your planning for worship. It would be easy for us to become engaged in our worship planning rather than in worship evaluation. It is also important to divorce evaluation of worship from worship or music style. Means of measurement or evaluation ought to be able to be applied to all worship, regardless of time, place, leadership, demographics, or style.

Here are 25 statements of evaluation or measurement that can be applied to your church's worship. After each statement, you can select the response that best applies to your church. You may want to re-word these statements to call for an individual and personal response from the person answering or for a response that evaluates the question as a congregation.

1 -- Strongest agreement
2 -- More agreement than disagreement
3 -- Neutral, no response, don't know
4 -- More disagreement than agreement
5 -- Strongest disagreement

Have your pastor, music staff, worship leaders, even your congregation complete their responses, collect them, analyze them, and most importantly, discuss them. What are you doing now that is working well? What can you improve upon? How do you do that? Not all these responses or statements are equally applicable all the time, but this little test will help you begin to measure the success of your church's worship. Please do not send your responses to Discipleship Ministries.

There are numerous books and resources available related to planning and leading worship. The one basic, inexpensive booklet that EVERY pastor, planner, and worship leader should have is one of the Guidelines for Leading Your Congregation series, titled Worship: Creating Opportunities to Meet and Respond to God by Daniel Benedict, available from Cokesbury (telephone 800-672-1789, www.cokesbury.com). This booklet has been used in formulating some of these statements.