What do you say
to a person who has been sick for 38 years? Jesus simply asked him, "Do you wish to get well?"
John 5:6. Sounds kind of simple,
doesn't it? But it's a profound
question to ask of ourselves, our marriages, our families, and even our
church. That is the reason why
Mark Ball, one of our newest Elders, and I went to Chicago, so we could
learn more about Natural Church Development.
We learned that
NCD measures eight "quality" characteristics of churches. Health is determined by the difference
in the adjective of each characteristic.
For instance, all churches have leadership, but the quality
characteristic that determines health is whether the church has
"empowering" leadership.
What does that mean?
Leaders, with an intimate relationship with God, who equip,
support, motivate, mentor and coach individuals to become all that God
wants them to be. "And He gave some as apostles, and
some as prophets, and some as evangelists, and some as pastors and
teachers, for the equipping of the saints for the work of service, to the
building up of the body of Christ; until we all attain to the unity of
the faith, and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to
the measure of the stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ,"
Ephesians 4:11-13. The other characteristics with their adjectives
are "Gift-based" ministry, "passionate" spirituality,
"effective" structures, "inspiring" worship services,
"holistic" small groups, "need-oriented" evangelism,
and "loving" relationships.
We knew
something was not right two years ago when we took our first survey. Mark Hoeffner, our regional director
for CBNW, met with 30 of our members involved in ministry and gave us a
quick overview of what NCD is and how it works. It's like a barrel with different
lengths of staves, i.e., strips of wood, around the barrel. The water (service attendance, members,
disciples) will only rise to the lowest level. By raising that particular stave, more
water (people) can be held. Our
first survey showed that "empowering" leadership was our
minimum factor.
So, what do you
do once you find out what the survey reveals? It is important to communicate it to
others, develop a team to find the reasons for it being the limiting
factor, develop an action plan to address those factors, take the time to
implement it, and then evaluate by taking another survey. This is what our first NCD team did
(Alan Ray, Denise Burgoyne, Lisa Slater, Mark Ball, Roland Shockley and
myself.) We collected comment
cards from the congregation, conducted interviews of various people,
gathered and sorted data and initially came up with 15 reasons for the
lack of empowerment which we were able to condense into 5 major areas;
problems with communication, lack of problem solving, organizational
structure in disarray, problems with vision-implementation and execution,
and mistrust.
Mark Hoeffner
became our consultant for a season, helping us to examine the
"growth forces" affecting this characteristic. The NCD team shared the suggestions for
implementation and the Elder Council unanimously accepted their
recommendation and began to implement them. A new Constitution, an All Servant's
Meeting of all ministry leaders to make decisions corporately, an
intentional plan to train and equip leaders are some of the key elements
of our health in this area.
Our second survey showed empowering
leadership going from our minimum up to an area of health. Each survey will show a minimum factor
each time and our second one showed that we have two right now. Mark and I went to Chicago to learn how
better to coach the next team.
That's the subject of my next newsletter
