Adapted from Helping Without Hurting in Generosity

As we’ve been writing this month around the theme of Generosity in God’s kingdom story, we’ve shared about the importance of giving in ways that lead to flourishing for both givers and receivers. God calls us to live into God’s story of change: pursuing His goals but also His way of achieving those goals. This raises the question of effectiveness, though. How do we know that we’re giving well?

We all want to give to ministries that can prove they are having an impact. But how do we measure impact? How do we know if the ministry we’re supporting is moving toward the goal of reconciling relationships with God, self, others, and creation?

Challenges

There are two major challenges in demonstrating kingdom impact.

The first challenge is coming up with feasible metrics for things that are highly intangible—healthy relationships with God, self, others, and creation. While this task is daunting, there is an explosion of interest in such metrics, capturing the attention of some of the world’s leading scholars and practitioners (such as the Harvard Flourishing Study, and the ongoing work of the Accord Network’s Spiritual Metrics and Kingdom Impact Framework groups).

The second is the difficulty in generating a counterfactual—can we isolate the impact of an organization’s work from other contributing factors. For example, if a microfinance organization working in an African country claims that clients experienced a 20% increase in income over the course of a two year program without noting that per-capita income for everyone in that country went up by the same amount in that time period due to an economic boom, there is no proof that the organization’s work had any real impact.

Randomized control trials (RCTs) can generate counterfactuals by tracking both a control group from the general population and a “treatment group” who receives a particular ministry program. RCTs are tricky to implement and beyond the capacity of most ministries. Further, holistic transformation is a long-term process that God does over the course of our entire lives. Real impacts of ministry may not show up within the limited 6-12 month scope of even a well-conducted RCT.

Opportunities

So what are organizations to do? Organizations can use right-fit approaches to learning, monitoring, and evaluation that givers can observe and use for discerning potential for impact.

Organizations committed to effectiveness tend to share 3 key qualities. They 1) have a solid theory of change (a sound reason for believing that what they are trying to do will achieve the outcomes they are looking for), 2) have a logical process that shows how the activities, inputs, outputs, and outcomes of their program can lead to the desired impacts, 3) are committed to being a learning organization that regularly seeks to understand (with qualitative and quantitative metrics) how they can do their work more effectively.

We should be mindful, though that spiritual outcomes are non-linear (think of our own personal journeys of following Jesus with their ups and downs!), and not always capturable in real-time data. There is work going on by the power of the Holy Spirit that we can’t always see. Also, there is a cost to our wondering about impact that is often borne by those on the ground in ministry with limited time and energy to spare for filling out surveys or traveling to interview participants. We should work hard to ensure that we can narrow down our curiosity to focus on the most meaningful outcomes that love, honor, and serve our neighbors.

Metrics matter, but as we seek to steward our time and ministry resources, we need to be careful to not seeing our metrics themselves as the goal of ministry. There is a very real sense in which “success looks like faithfulness”—that leaning into God’s story of change over the long haul is what leads to the impacts we seek, focusing on what we know to be true from Scripture, faithfully doing what God has told us to do, and then trusting Him to yield the fruit.

In our next post, we’ll explore practical ways this can work out in ministry so that we can steward our giving well.