Greetings, Account Managers:

It may seem odd to get spiritual advice from The American Accounting Association, but as a preacher I’ve learned that almost any deep dive into the internet can eventually be justified as sermon research. Which leads me to commend a recent study published in The Accounting Review which analyzed the status of status reports (a summary of the study can be found here). The conclusion of the study seems to be counterintuitive: If your manager requests frequent status reports, your performance is likely to suffer. Spending time on mid-project evaluation, the researchers found, left people scrambling to not look like idiots, a condition that resulted in a higher rate of error when taking a simple test of cognitive reasoning. The more often participants had to report their progress on the test, the more frequently they made mistakes.

The implications for this research immediately struck me as having implications for how we gauge the quality of our relationships. As a pastoral counselor, I coached several couples to talk less about their relationship and spend more time having a relationship. Few questions are more chilling than having your spouse ask how you think the marriage is going; usually the response is an unhelpful scramble to not look like an idiot.

Equally applicable is how this research should shift the way we evaluate congregational dynamics. Typically, church health is tracked on a “dashboard” reviewing three things: 1. How many? (i.e., attendance or activity participation), 2. How much? (i.e., what’s it going to cost?) and 3. How often? (do we have to do this every week, once a month, once a year, or every centennial?). The problem with this calculus is how effective ministries are set aside because we fail to consider the quality of relationships or impact of lives changed. In fact, to meet the above metrics, deeper relationships and meaningful connections are sometimes scuttled to create bigger, albeit shallower, events. I used to point out when fundraising for the counseling center that pastoral counseling was the least efficient ministry if you were going to evaluate its quality by “bang for buck” thinking. Meeting intensively with only one or two people an hour was a much humbler process than holding massive rallies or big training retreats.

Which brings me to the question of spirituality. Analyzing our relationship with God is not the same as having a relationship with God. Frequent check-ins regarding our frequency of prayer, our acts of kindness and yes, even our church attendance, tell us little regarding our sense of absolute dependence on God’s grace. I grew up in a tradition where leaders often asked questions like, “How’s your prayer life?” Trust me, my answer was more focused on my not looking like an idiot than an earnest evaluation of my spiritual condition.

Rather than seeking frequent status reports, it seems time is better spent in addressing the task at hand: pushing our attention away from how we are doing and giving more focus to what we are doing. A little less “Do you pray?” and a lot more “Let us pray.”

Working to evaluate less and invigorate more, I remain,

With Love,
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor