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Leading with Clarity: Measuring What Truly Matters
As a church leader, you want to see your congregation thrive—but how do you measure real spiritual impact? Beyond attendance and giving, true ministry success is about whole-life flourishing and church-wide health. This course equips you with a research-backed framework to assess your church’s strengths and areas for growth.
As a church leader, you want to see your congregation thrive—but how do you measure real spiritual impact? Beyond attendance and giving, true ministry success is about whole-life flourishing and church-wide health. This course equips you with a research-backed framework to assess your church’s strengths and areas for growth.
With practical tools and insights from Barna’s decades of research, you’ll gain clarity on what’s working, what needs attention, and how to lead with confidence. Stop guessing—discover how to measure what truly matters and guide your church toward lasting impact.
Why this course?
Many pastors feel the weight of leading their church without a clear way to measure true impact. This course provides a research-driven framework to move beyond assumptions and make informed, confident ministry decisions. By focusing on what truly matters—nurturing spiritual growth, leading your people well and growing a thriving faith community—you’ll gain the tools to strengthen your church for the long run.
A Clear Framework for Measuring Ministry
It’s easy to track attendance and giving, but these numbers don’t tell the full story. This course introduces a proven framework that helps you assess church health across multiple dimensions (7 dimensions of human flourishing, 15 dimensions of church thriving), giving you a holistic view of your ministry’s impact.
A Clear Framework for Measuring Ministry
Making strategic decisions doesn’t mean leaving faith behind. Learn how to combine data-driven insights with spiritual discernment, so you can lead your church with both wisdom and conviction.
Practical Tools for Real Change
This course doesn’t just provide ideas—it equips you with actionable tools to evaluate your church and take meaningful next steps. You’ll walk away with a plan to assess, adjust and activate lasting transformation in your congregation.
At the end of this course, you will...
Gain a Research-Backed Framework
Implement Data-Informed Strategies
Lead with Clarity and Confidence
Included in this course:
To set us up for success, Nona begins the course by touching on the value of healthy churches, congregations and leadership, exhorting you to align your mission with God’s.
In a rapidly changing world, Nona explains why we cannot rely on autopilot anymore. There are theological and practical bases for data-driven church decision-making, which are explored in this session.
Before we provide insights from the data about the Church as a whole, it’s helpful to consider your context and the local church’s unique problems. This lesson leads you through a quick and honest evaluation to discover where your church is right now.
In this session, Nona shares how we need to focus on each person’s whole life, rather than just one element of well-being. Life isn’t neatly compartmentalized, which is why it’s important to measure more than just theological beliefs or spiritual well-being to understand whether people are truly flourishing.
When evaluating the health of your church, it’s easy to rely on attendance and giving trends. However, many churches have risen to great heights with massive budgets and thousands in attendance, only to fall apart under the strain. This session helps you determine where your church falls in the 15 dimensions of flourishing, so you can work to pursue a healthier faith community.
Resilience is often used to mean “grit” or “determination” in our culture. However, in this session, we’ll learn how resilience is about growth in the midst of difficulties. Instead of being hardened like steel, leaders should strive to be like trees with strong roots.
As the course comes to a close, Nona reflects on what was learned and offers church leaders more resources to tap into as you continue on your journey of pursuing human flourishing and congregational thriving within your church!
Nona Jones
Nona Jones is a rare combination of preacher, business executive, author, and entrepreneur. She currently serves as Global Ambassador for YouVersion, publicly championing its family of 715M+ downloaded Bible Apps.
She and her husband, Pastor Tim, lead Open Door Church in Gainesville, FL and are the proud parents of two boys.
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FAQ
Nona Jones (preacher, business executive and author) leads this seven-session course from Barna Group, equipping church leaders with a research-based framework to measure true ministry impact beyond attendance and giving.
Plan for an hour to an hour and a half to go through each session, especially if you’re going through the content in a group. The videos in this course range from 3 to 14 minutes, and the discussion questions and activities will likely take up the rest of your meeting time.
This course is 7 sessions long. Feel free to cover the sessions in increments that make the most sense for you and your leadership team. For some, it might work best to go through one session a week, for others it might be better to cover one session a month. We do not recommend doubling up on sessions.
This course is based on Barna Group’s research report The State of Your Church. We recommend reading the book as you go through the course, but it is not required.
In its 40-year history, Barna Group has conducted more than two million interviews over the course of thousands of studies and has become a go-to source for insights about faith and culture, leadership and vocation, and generations. Barna Group has worked with thousands of businesses, nonprofit organizations and churches across the U.S. and around the world.
Barna is an independent, privately held, nonpartisan organization based in Dallas, Texas, with offices in Nashville, Tennessee; Ventura, California; and Atlanta, Georgia.
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