Transforming Church

His work was being debated. After all, who would expect the German church to foster any project on church growth, especially with some of the characteristics of church life that Schwarz described, such as: passionate spirituality, need-oriented evangelism, or inspiring worship?

Through his research, Schwarz determined that there were eight phrases, including those above, which kept emerging as the identifiers of growing and faithful churches. If 30 or fewer leaders of a congregation could be surveyed using a standardized questionnaire, and the results compared with the rest of the churches around the world and in one’s one territory, a profile would be obtained of that congregation that would point to the barriers to growth. The most basic discovery was that a church stopped growing at the point in which its greatest weakness was not addressed. Schwarz used the image of a barrel with uneven staves. When water is poured in a barrel, the level of the water stops rising when the lowest barrel stave is reached. So with the growth of a church: if inspiring worship gets the lowest marks in survey, until all of the issues around worship are addressed, including such things as providing quality childcare, then the congregation will cease attracting new people into its life and mission.

In 2000, I took the training provided by Coachnet, Inc., Carol Stream, Illinois, with Bob Logan of Fuller Institute, Pasadena, California, and used the process in my congregation. We had worked for several years to develop a deeper personal spirituality through a focus on prayer, prayer vigils, retreats, and small groups, and thought that we were really doing quite exceptional work for Lutherans! Our lowest mark? Passionate Spirituality.

We quickly learned a couple of the core discoveries of NCD.
1.) Leaders almost never guess what their lowest indicator will be.

2.) In each indicator, the adjective is more important that the noun; i.e., every congregation has a spirituality, but passionate? After years of working in Lutheran congregations, I have discovered that people are still stymied about talking about their passions, except for an awkward moment with a shifting smile, and then back on task, attempting to answer the question, they often draw a total blank.

3) If a congregation consistently scores above 60 on each of its eight indicators, it will be growing numerically. That has been demonstrated again and again across the world.

4.) NCD is built on a Pauline, organic sense of the church as a natural, growing organism, that grows using the principles of nature and the work that God has created.

The result of our journey was that we learned again that everything in the life of the congregation is interrelated, and NCD taught us to move from making individual decisions about specific programs to a more focused process of asking what impact change would have on other parts of the congregation-as-system.

What we were also able to do in our congregation, as a result of our own survey, was to tap into the incredible wealth of the Coachnet.org web-based resource of programs and materials. Anyone can go the general page on the website: www.coachnet.org, but if you have been certified as an NCD coach, you have a large library of resources in each of the eight areas of congregational life. It is being added to on an almost daily basis, and provides a peer-to-peer way to glean insight and programming from Christian leaders across the globe. Then, having worked on your lowest indicator, the survey is taken again, and again, as the NCD process unfolds. New mission congregations are now being established.

Currently, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is training coaches and leaders in the NCD process. Bob Logan has worked with Dave Daubert, to create a customized track for our denomination. Working through pilot synods, the network is being carefully developed and augmented. As a result, if you are interested in discovering how you might have an NCD coach work with you, or become an NCD coach yourself, there are several avenues you might take. The basic resource to read as you begin your journey with NCD is Natural Church Development, Christian A. Schwartz, Church Smart Resources, Carol Stream, Illinois.