Transform’s potential impact on church growth

Evaluation Context

ICM believes in the local church’s potential to alleviate all extents of poverty in unreached communities of the world, through their widespread and unique reach. ICM seeks to empower the local church, through partnering with their pastors, to bring Transform – a 16-week program helping the poorest families experience values, livelihood, health, and education transformation – to their communities.

Every year, Transform runs in approximately 1,500 Philippine communities, reaching 30 of each community’s poorest households. Such vital work can only be sustained if the local churches are growing and empowered to serve beyond their current reach, and ICM’s hope is that through Transform, these churches may experience growth as more individuals are brought to church through the program. Given this, ICM conducted a three-pronged analysis to explore Transform’s impact in empowering local churches through church growth.

Evaluation Design and Results

ICM monitors church attendance through: (1) Baseline and Endline Transform Participant Survey Data, where participants are asked before and after the Transform program whether they attended church and if these churches were led by ICM’s partner pastors, and (2) Monthly Thrive Pastor Data Cards, where pastors are asked about the number of people who attended their church in the past week. This study makes use of data collected between October 2015 to November 2019 from both data streams.

Three different analyses were conducted to explore Transform’s impact on church growth. The description and results of each method are summarised below:

First Method

Using Transform survey data, ICM explored the participant-level impact of the program by generating a Sankey diagram to track the movement and to measure the volume of participants who were either unchurched or affiliated with other denominations or non-ICM network churches prior to Transform but started attending the church of their Transform (ICM partner) pastor after the program. The diagram revealed that the number of participants attending ICM-affiliated churches increased by 8% after Transform (n=10,455), suggesting that for every 100 people (or for every 3 to 4 churches), 8 more people (8%) attended ICM network churches after completing the program. In other words, through Transform, 2 to 3 additional people were drawn to the local church in the span of 4 months.

Second Method

ICM explored the church-level impact of the program over time, focusing only on the network pastors who had implemented Transform in their communities. Panel regression analysis was employed to estimate the impact of implementing Transform on church attendance. The attendance data reported by Transform pastors in their Thrive data cards were used for this analysis. These calculations revealed that Transform increased the participating church’s size by 0.5 people per month (n = 2,321). This means that over the course of the 4-month program, Transform increased church attendance by approximately 2 people, in close agreement with the previous findings.

Third Method

ICM also explored the church-level impact of the program on current church attendance. Ordinary Least Squares regression analysis was used to estimate Transform’s impact on the most recent church size. To do this, ICM compared the attendance rates of Transform participating and non-participating churches. The study found that churches that implemented Transform had approximately 2 to 3 more attendees compared to churches that have not implemented the program (n=14,236).

Though each method looked at church growth through different lenses, all three sets of analyses led to the same conclusion: Through Transform, the average pastor saw an increase of 2 to 3 more people attend their church. As ICM continues to reach over 1,500 communities each year, this encouraging conclusion suggests that the program empowers the local church to see an additional 2,000 to 3,000 people join the global church every year.