Assessment Instruments
Natural Church Development
Natural Church Development is a movement to grow healthy churches. The system has been adopted by tens of thousands of churches around the world. The journey begins with a survey of 30 people from your church. The results are normed against the database of thousands of responses. You will get a report of how your church measures up in the eight characteristics they have identified as the keys to healthy, growing churches. Actions are mapped to raise the lowest factor in the survey, and thereby raise the overall health of the community.
You will find a short description of the eight characteristics here.
Here are the eight essential qualities of healthy churches along with links to resources to support the development of these characteristics:
Empowering Leadership: Learn about delegation and empowerment here. Learn about helping members do ministry here. Learn here about training lay ministers. Jesus modeled Servant Leadership for us. Self-serving leaders will not empower others. Look here for the difference.
Gift-Oriented Ministry: Here is an article on Spiritual Gifts. This site has links to several gifts inventories. This link provides information about Life Keys, a gift inventory. Under organization, click on "test drive" and try out Life Keys.
Passionate Spirituality: Here you can find how to start building discipleship communities.
Functional Structures: Here you can find sample organizational structures and a model constitution to create functional structures. Here is information about how to integrate the Marks of Discipleship into your church system.
Inspiring Worship: Sally Morgenthaler's website offers many insights and tools for inspiring worship. She also wrote a book, Worship Evangelism, that is available on her site.
Holistic Small Groups: Read John Weber's article, Why Small Groups? David Stark wrote a wonderful book, Growing People through Small Groups. Training manuals using Stark's process are available at Changing Church.
Need-Based Evangelism: Magnetic Church provides workshops and resources for connecting with your community. Percept provides demographic and psychographic data for churches. They will customize a report for your church based on zip codes or a radius around your location. Their data helps us to design outreach based on real needs expressed by the community.
Loving Relationships
The ELCA has adopted NCD as a tool to implement across the United States. In 2004, pilot Synods are training coaches and starting the work. To get involved in NCD, churches need to be free of major conflict for at least one year.
We are currently organizing NCD coaches training in Atlanta for the ELCA Southeastern Synod. Contact atl@transformingchurch.com if you are interested.
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