Many in full-time vocational ministry are so busy leading, coordinating, planning, strategizing, and even dealing with the immediate crisis that it’s hard to stop and reflect on all the ways God worked in your church over the last year. But sharing God’s faithfulness to your church is worth celebrating. A year-end report is a simple and effective way to share this information. If the thought of creating a formal document to share the information is adding one more to-do to an endless list, use this simple guide to help put a framework around creating an annual report.
Mission and Vision
Every organization, including churches, must continually reinforce its mission and vision. The mission is the reason the church exists, while the vision is a way to paint a picture of accomplishing the mission. The year-end report is the opportunity to remind the church why it exists and how it’s getting there.
Metrics
Some people are bored by numbers, but numbers tell a story of God’s faithfulness and trust. Besides, numbers often represent people or their support for the church. Here are a few metrics to share with the church:
Donations
The congregation needs to know how well the church manages the financial resources entrusted to them. The following reports provide insight into the designation of their donations and how well the church adjusted to the variance between the budget and actual donations.
- Summarize donations to specific designations like operating, benevolence, capital improvement, or other funds.
- Show how giving compares to the budget.
- Show how spending compares to the budget.
- Show how giving compares to expenditures.
- Show how much the church donated to benevolence and global and local outreach. Providing this metric models generosity to the church.
Attendance
Providing a view of attendance completes the major components of the metric picture. When reviewing these metrics, remove pride from the equation; the motive is to reach more people with the gospel message, and these metrics help evaluate the strategies’ effectiveness.
- Adult Attendance: Whether this metric is the total for the year or an average per weekend, it’s helpful to show a comparison from previous years to show the percentage of change.
- Children’s Attendance: Provide this metric in the same way as the adult attendance for consistency.
- Youth Attendance: Many churches offer mid-week gatherings in addition to weekend services, making it important to be consistent when providing this metric.
- Group Participation: Churches that emphasize groups and mid-week studies as a method for discipleship can reveal their effectiveness by showing how many people benefit from these essential ministries.
- Camps/Events: Include participation at youth camps and other church events like VBS (Vacation Bible School), Trunk or Treat, etc.
- Volunteers: Volunteers are the lifeblood of churches. Provide metrics to show how many volunteers and their hours over the past 12 months.
Celebrate
It’s important to share stories about how your church impacted lives over the last year. Provide personal testimonies of those who made decisions to follow Christ. Capture the number of baptisms along with personal stories of their journey. Consider other successes like the number of first-time givers, community involvement, and even the global impact of the church in the last year. Reflecting on God’s faithfulness in working in and through the church during the previous 12 months, take the opportunity to cast the vision for the upcoming year, the initiatives, projects, and challenges to overcome.
Share It
Creating a year-end report is more than an exercise for the church staff to remember God’s faithfulness; it’s a way to encourage and inspire the congregation. Once the information is complete, put it on the website, share it via email, and print copies to distribute throughout the church.
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