The Chapel served more meals in a week than any restaurant in Akron.  They had a feeding program for everyone it seemed.  They had an entire three storey WING just for youth ministry.  They didn’t have a singles group; they had singles groups for single and widowed, single and divorced, single and looking, and single and happy to be single.  They didn’t just have a support group for people dealing with issues.  They had support groups for cancer (three different kinds of cancer, as I recall), for grief, for broken families and on and on.  And the library!  They had a very large, impressive library, but then in an adjacent room were all the resources a pastor could ever want, including a rare book collection with at least one first edition of a 200 or 300 year old commentary.  It was AMAZING.

Regional churches such as this one are large enough that they can specialize and provide programs that few smaller churches could possibly provide.  (In 2003, 74% of all Canadian evangelical churches had fewer than 150 attendees.)  The large concentration of people enabled the church to move beyond providing basic services to offering very specific, targetted services that met specialized needs.  It is, in fact, a resource to all the churches in Akron.  And that is an advantage to being big.  I never again felt that large churches were out of place.  Large churches and agencies help the church fulfill its mission in ways that smaller organizations can’t.  Large and small churches both have their places.

Very few Christian ministries in Canada are large.  In my last post I gave some statistics showing how small most Canadian ministries are.  Based on the 22,000 T3010′s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC, here are some stats for the larger ministries:

• Only 1,179 ministries (6%) report more than $1 million in total revenue, and only 96 (0.6%) have more than $10 million
  • As a matter of interest, about half of the ministries with more than $1 million are members of CCCC (and all but 14 of the ones over $10 million are members)*
• Only 6.5% report ten or more employees, and only 317 (1.4%) report having more than 30
  • I’m highly suspicious of this number because a huge number of charities leave the line for employees blank.  Do they have no employees or are they not filling the form out correctly?  Nevertheless, the stats are what they are

Here are some of the advantages that large ministries provide to the mission of God and some of the responsibilities that go with their size.  It is possible that some smaller ministries may have some of these benefits too, but it is not likely that very many would.

• A small ministry works hard just to run its programs, but then it also has to fundraise, do all the administration and look after the myriad of other things that have to happen to make the ministry work.  (This is one reason why the CCCC exists – to help charities of all sizes with these supporting functions so they can concentrate more on their core missions!)  A larger ministry not only has the staff to do all of that, but it can also have staff who work on the ministry rather than in the ministry.  I got that idea from a secular business writer, Michael Gerber, who wrote The E-myth Revisited – required reading for any entrepreneur, including ministry entrepreneurs.  I’m not completely sold on everything he writes in the book, but I do think he’s got a gem of an idea as it applies to organizational leadership!  Larger ministries can have people with the time to think deeply about their mission and become thought-leaders in their fields.  In a ministry that overlaps with the secular sphere’s interests (such as relief work), they can speak out and be respected in the public sphere.
• Larger ministries have the capacity and infrastructure to take on a leadership role in much larger projects than most ministries could handle.  In overseas development work, for example, their ability to handle large, comprehensive projects that cover a region and not just a neighbourhood gives them credibility that may open doors to leverage Christian donations with government funding.  Rather than dealing with fifty small organizations, government funding agencies can deal with one or two large ones.
• Not only do large ministries have the people to handle larger projects, they also have the ability to raise significantly more funds than a small ministry can, and therefore can respond to more complex, expensive opportunities than a small ministry can.  There are a number of very large inner-city missions across Canada that I’ve toured that have developed some very exciting and comprehensive programs, but they required millions of dollars to implement them.
• While large ministries undoubtedly have more management overhead, good management results in more efficient operations.  And since there are more programs to allocate the overhead to, a large ministry is likely more efficient than a number of small ministries each running just a few programs, especially when one evaluates outcomes rather than simply outputs.
• Beneficiaries benefit from large ministries too.  Looking again at a large inner-city mission, it can provide its beneficiaries with a complete solution, such as a shelter combined with training for job skills and addiction counselling.
• With size comes responsibility (Luke 12:38).  Their size makes large ministries a highly visible witness to the world of Christian love and compassion at work.  This may be a side of Christianity that many people aren’t aware of, and these ministries may be the only Christian witness these people encounter.  Large ministries should make sure their Christian identity is known.
• A corollary of the last point is that since they do have such high public visibility, they will be seen by the public as representative of Christian ministries.  This means that all the more care must be taken by large ministries to protect the reputation of our faith.  If their practices are unbecoming a Christian ministry, all Christian ministries are discredited to a degree because of our shared identification with Jesus Christ.  So for this reason alone, even if there were no biblical basis for accountability to the body of Christ (which there is), they are accountable to us (and, of course, to the Lord himself!).
• Christian agencies provide a means for people to work together across denominational boundaries.  They provide “neutral territory” based on a common belief in the essentials of the Christian faith.  They are therefore a powerful witness to the unity of the people of God.  The large ministries, which are more likely to have a broad cross-section of the church represented among their staff and volunteers, should be sure to add to their primary mission a secondary mission of demonstrating the unity that can be achieved while respecting the diversity of denominational distinctives.  At every opportunity, I tell reporters and others that the CCCC membership reflects a broad cross-section of our faith and not just a few particular denominations.

So both large and small ministries have something to contribute to the work of the church.  This begs the question, if I have an idea for a new ministry, should I start my own or try to get an existing ministry to take it on?  I’ll address that in the next post.

* I revised these stats after looking at the actual list produced by the database.  There were, in fact, a number of non-Christian charities included in the stats as originally published in this post.

I remember that as the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony orchestra took their seats in the pit my wife expressed surprise at how small it was (about thirty people I think, a lot fewer than the number in the You Tube performance I linked to above).  She imagined that unmic’d orchestras must have a lot more people to get the rich sound that was on the record.  And then, only a few bars into the overture, she whispered in amazement “That sounds just like the record!!!”  Yes, a small group of people produced a very large sound.  In fact, they sounded just like a ‘real’ orchestra!

It’s amazing what a small group can do that is out of all proportion to their size.  Think about the dozen apostles.  About Paul and his missionary team.  A small group can change the world!  One of my staff members said that at CCCC, “we are a small team doing big things.”  I love that thought!

The dream of many small ministries, while often not stated, is to become a big ministry.  At CCCC, we have close to 10% of all Christian ministries as members, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be 100%!  Thinking like this, though, focuses your attention on how small you are now.  And then you run the risk of wondering if you are really accomplishing anything as a small ministry.  This angst could become an impediment to your current success.  I’d like to say a few encouraging words to the smaller ministries of Canada (next post I’ll say something to the larger ministries).  What I’m going to say could apply to larger ministries too, but they have to work a lot harder than smaller ministries to get these advantages.

The fact is that Christian ministries in Canada are very small.  Based on the 22,000 T3010′s for Christian ministries that we have in our database at CCCC (and assuming they are correctly filled out):

• 80% have less than $300,000 in total revenue, and about half have less than $100,000
• 80% have 4 or fewer employees, and about half have exactly one staff member
  • 105 report no employees at all (just volunteers)
  • 16% say they have two employees
  • 93.5% have 9 or fewer paid staff

Given our small size, here are some things to remember:

• God delights in working through the unlikely, which means he likes to work with the small group that the world might not pay attention to.  In Deut. 7:7-8 Moses says to Israel, “The LORD did not set his love on you nor choose you because you were more in number than any of the peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples, but because the LORD loved you….”  God did not take the larger nations of Egypt, Assyria or Babylon as his people; he took a people and made them his people, not because of their might, their size or their importance in the world, but just because he loved them.  You don’t have to be big for God to work through you.  Work at your ministry with all you’ve got, knowing that God works through underdogs like a young shepherd boy, a group of country-bumpkin Galileans (at least according to the priests of Jerusalem), and a timid young pastor named Timothy.
• God likes to work in ways that make it clear it is him who is the source of success, not humans.  The best example of this is in Judges 7, where the LORD says to Gideon, “The people who are with you are too many for me to give Midian into their hands, for Israel would become boastful, saying, ‘My own power has delivered me.’”  The group of 22,000 men gets whittled down to 300, an appropriately small number to prove that they are fighting under the power of God and not under their own strength.  Although a small ministry, and maybe because you are a small ministry, God may use you to demonstrate his activity in our world.  When the job is so big that you can’t do it, then you know that your accomplishments are God’s.  So work hard, knowing that God is working beside you and around you in ways you may not even know, but be assured he will accomplish his purposes for calling you into ministry.
• Being a small ministry, you are much more likely to think carefully about which programs and services to continue offering.  You can’t afford to carry anything forward just because it’s part of your routine.  You can’t throw money or people at your opportunities, since you don’t have the capacity to do that, so you must choose carefully how to use the precious resources you have, pruning old programs to make way for new programs.  By always focussing on the best use of your limited resources, you will likely have a very effective and efficient ministry.
• You are more likely to find creative ways to stretch your influence, by partnering with others or drawing on volunteers, because you have to.  My first boss, Richard Adair, believed the secret to success as a small entrepreneur is to ride the coat-tails of a larger company.  They do the heavy work of acquiring the customer, for example, and you simply provide the add-on to the sale.  As a small ministry, your calling might be to serve specialized, small niches that the larger organizations have missed while focussing on the more general and broader needs.  You might be a specialty add-on to the services provided by larger organizations.
• Small ministries don’t have the resources to develop a bureaucracy, so it is easier to have a creative entrepreneurial environment.  Small ministries can be the ‘skunk works’ of Christian ministry, the testing ground for new ideas.  Encourage innovation.
• As a small organization, you will probably be able to respond quicker to issues or changes in the environment.  You can be fast on your feet and quick to exploit new opportunities.  Create an organizational culture that supports change.
• In a flat organization, you can communicate easier with your staff than a large organization can, and you can also involve them in decisions and planning that they might not experience in a large ministry.  Staff will likely have greater variety in their work because the jobs have to be broader in scope to make up for the limited number of employees.  In addition, you will likely empower your team more and delegate more to them (out of necessity), thus giving you an advantage in hiring people because they will be able to use more of their talents and have more influence over their work than elsewhere.
• The environment of a small ministry is very motivational in and of itself for your team members because all of them are very close to the ministry’s results and they can see the fruit of their labour for themselves.  There is nothing like appreciative feedback to spur you on.  It is astonishing how many compliments the CCCC gets, and I make sure that all the staff share the compliments with the team so that we can all be encouraged by them.

As with any ministry, don’t measure your success in terms of growth or size, but in terms of how well you are fulfilling your mission.  God created your ministry to assist with his mission, so progressively fulfilling the specific part of his mission that you are called to serve is the way you should assess your success.

Finally, when you feel you are small and struggling along by yourself, remember God’s promise that is so important that it appears not once, but four times in scripture (Deut 31:6, 31:8, Josh 1:5 and Heb 13:5): “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.”

May God richly bless your ministry!

The book is The Ultimate Question by Fred Reichheld.  The premise is that marketing surveys ask too many questions that provide only marginal information.  Often the answers don’t give enough information for you to know what to change.  Those questions are also the questions that the asker wants answers to, as opposed to what the responders would really like to say.  (I wrote about this problem of presuming you know what the issues are in a previous post.)

Reichheld believes that real long term sustainable growth for any organization occurs because its supporters love doing business with them and sing their praises to their friends and colleagues.  He believes that any organization, for-profit, charity or government agency, can benefit from asking the ultimate question.

If you have satisfied supporters, they become your marketing department, leveraging well beyond anything you could afford to pay for.  Your strongest supporters are also your strongest promoters.  The ultimate question helps you raise more supporters and tells you how to help them become more committed to your organization.

The ultimate question is: How likely is it that you would recommend this organization to a friend or colleague?  On a scale of ten (ten being the most likely to recommend), those who score 9 or 10 are your promoters.  Those who score 6 or less are your detractors.  If you subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters you are left with your net promoter score.  (People who score 7 or 8 are called passives – they are satisfied but unenthusiastic.)  Reichheld’s extensive research shows that the organizations with the most efficient growth engines have a net promoter score of 50% to 80%.

Aside from the ultimate question itself, you would ask only one other question (aside from any demographics you want).  If they scored as a promoter, you would ask “What is the primary reason for the score you just gave us?”  That will tell you what you are doing that is highly valued by your supporters.  If they score as a passive or a detractor, you ask “What is the most important improvement that would make you rate us closer to a ten?”  That will tell you what you are doing that is sabotaging your relationships.

At CCCC, we hired a market research firm to do our survey for us.  I think they were quite surprised that we only asked two questions, but wow, did we get some good information from those two questions (as well as a much smaller invoice!).  First, we had an astonishing 37% response rate to our survey.  This alone was remarkable, but I think it was due to the fact, at least partially, that the survey was a really short survey that was done entirely online.  It turned out 60% of our members are promoters, 30% are passive and 10% are detractors.  So we squeaked into the efficient growth range with a net promoter score of 50%. 

Our survey revealed lots of things about us that we wouldn’t necessarily have known to ask about, both strengths and oppportunities for improvement.  We also surveyed former members and never members with different questions and got good results there too.

There’s lots more advanced analysis regarding segmentation of your supporters that Reichheld  includes in his book that we at CCCC haven’t got to yet, but that will come.  I think this is where the book could be improved with more examples of how this advanced analysis is done.  He explains it, maybe I just need more examples, especially from the charitable sector.  I noticed today that there is another book called Answering the Ultimate Question: How Net Promoter Can Transform Your Business by two of Reichheld’s co-developers of the net promoter model.  (The subtitle is correct, but I think it should say How Net Promoters….)  I haven’t read this one yet, but it is advertised as providing lots of real-life case studies of how the model is applied.  Perhaps you should buy the two books together.  I’ll be getting the second one.