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Pastor, do you really know the quality of your church's health?

Here are a few questions to ponder as we seek to create an awareness of Church Health during the month of May.

• How do you measure the attitudes, feelings and perceptions of the key influencers in your church?
• How do you discover the elephant in the room in a healthy and meaningful way?
• How do you discover little issues before they become huge problems?

People's real attitudes, feelings and perspectives are hard to determine at times especially in a church. So how do you get below the surface of what people are thinking and expecting in your community of faith?

In my 23 years of ministry the best tool out there for doing this is Natural Church Development Survey.  In 1995 our six year old church plant participated in a global research project conducted by Christian Schwarz.

The study examined 1,000 churches in 32 countries from 5 continents. A total of 4.2 million pieces of data were collected and thoroughly analyzed using approved methods from social science. The research followed stringent scientific procedures assuring the accuracy of the results (The best book to read to get an overview of the process is The ABC's of Natural Church Development).

The research results confirm what many leaders have known intuitively -- healthy churches are growing churches, making more and better disciples in loving obedience to Christ. Eight essential qualities were identified, which can be measured quantitatively:

• Empowering leadership
• Gift-oriented ministry
• Passionate spirituality
• Functional structures
• Inspiring worship
• Holistic small groups
• Need-oriented evangelism
• Loving relationship

In my coaching of pastors and churches I encourage them to look at these qualities as systems or processes in the life of the church. At anytime in the life of a church it will have a weak system that needs to be addressed, fixed or developed further.  NCD helps the church pin point that system which needs to be developed. In reality it is a self-diagnosis conducted by the 30 key influencers in the church.  The results reflect want the church is really thinking about the health of its systems.  This is invaluable information for a pastor.

This is why I encourage churches to embrace the concept of the church health rhythm where you are addressing underlining attitudes, feelings and expectations on an annual basis by working the Natural Church Development process in your church.

We at Converge MidAmerica would love to assist your church on this journey to health and missional fruitfulness.