How to Measure the Effectiveness of Your Church’s Child Discipleship

Article September 21, 2022

Have you ever wondered, “Is our ministry helping kids know Jesus better? Are we helping them to be spiritually formed, building foundations of faith that last a lifetime?” If so, you’ve come to the right place! Awana has partnered with Barna Group to create an assessment to help churches assess their ministries to determine if what they are doing is leading kids towards a resilient, lasting faith.

Let’s be honest, stopping to assess how we’re doing, how effective our ministries are … well, that’s not usually the priority. Because if you’re a full-time staff member, Sunday is always coming. It’s hard to stop and take stock when you’re constantly managing the next thing.

If you’re a volunteer, assessment may be even lower on the totem pole because your volunteer role at church is just one of the many hats you wear. This isn’t your “job,” at least not one you get paid to think about.

And chances are, if you do have a culture that evaluates your ministry, you might be measuring the wrong thing. After all, what’s the number one thing a parent asks their kids at pick up?

‘Did you have … (say it with me) FUN?’

Yes, this is like the number one question parents ask their kids every week. And there’s NOTHING wrong with fun, but is it measuring discipleship?

To help you assess the state of child discipleship in your local church, we partnered with Gloo to create a custom assessment tool for you to utilize among your congregation. While it might sound complex, we promise you can be up and running in minutes!

The assessment comes with 27 pre-populated questions and an option to add up to 30 additional custom questions you might want to ask your church about child discipleship. Without any modification, it should take 4-9 minutes for a user to complete.

Here’s how:


Step 1: Create a Gloo Account

Click here to create a Gloo account to begin building your assessment.

Step 2: Find the “Children’s Ministry Assessment”

Once you’re logged into your Gloo account, you will be taken to Gloo’s Assessment Library. Search for the “Children’s Ministry Assessment” with the Awana logo and click the tile to start building your custom assessment.

Step 3: Click “Configure New Assessment”

Create a title specific to your local church, then dive into any custom options you desire. We recommend beginning with the 27 pre-populated questions, which we’ve carefully crafted.

Step 4: Share It With Your Congregation

Once you’ve created a unique title, added any custom questions, and configure any of the other custom features, click the “Share” tab for instructions to distribute it to your congregation whether via text, direct link or QR code. Those completing your assessment do not need a Gloo account, just a link to access it. If you chose, they will have an option to submit their specific contact info at the end of the assessment.

Step 5: Analyze Your Results

Once at least five participants have completed your assessment, you can begin to review your results to get a pulse on child discipleship in your local church!

While it might appear intimidating, we encourage you to start simple. As time goes on, you can share the same assessment or create a new instance to measure how you’re progressing. Perhaps on your second go around, add a few custom questions specific to new initiatives in your ministry. Or just keep them the same. It’s all up to you!

However you utilize it, we pray this tool blesses you to accurately measure and understand the effectiveness of child discipleship in your local church.