What is your church ready for?
Before you begin a process of responding to your results, we recommend that you assess your church’s readiness. Reflect on the capacity of your church and determine the best approach for your church to review and respond to your survey results.
Your church is invited to explore and respond to your survey results in a prayerful, participative process by which you celebrate and define yourselves as a faith community. You may choose to engage a planning process to identify the vision and action which will enable your church to shape your future, in the light of the Church’s mission.
We encourage you to respond to your survey results in your own way. Many factors make your church unique so we provide a range of exercises to choose from to help your church move forward. You can use to tailor a process to suit your particular context, life stage and people.
In any process of review, planning or action, it is important to consider the capacity of the churchgoers to respond to and to join in on any future planning or goal setting. NCLS results can inform various situations and stages of a church’s life.
Worksheets are provided in the Church Life Survey Workbook to reflect on:
Our readiness to review results
- The life stage of our church: If we were to describe our church as at a particular ‘life stage’, which would we pick?
- Our people: As we think of the people of our church, how would we describe them?
- Our local neighbourhood: What characterises our local neighbourhood context at this time? Has this impacted the local church at all?
- How do these factors impact the capacity of our people to participate in a process of review and respond to our results?
Our goals and a process to suit
- What do we hope our church might achieve from responding to our survey results and considering future ministry or mission?
- What goals would we like to set? e.g. celebrate and affirm the people of our church, identify key insights from our survey feedback, deeply reflect on our results in order to set our
future direction or pursue our vision
How we will evaluate, communicate and act
- Choose a method of initial evaluation of results amongst leaders or core group: e.g. reflection alone, conversation with mentor, discussion with core leadership team
- Choose a way to communicate our findings with our church: e.g. written report to council or elders, verbal report
- Chose a process to determine future action steps with our church: e.g. facilitated workshop, retreat weekend, small group taskforce
After you have reflected on your church's capacity and readiness, we encourage you to take three steps to make best use of your results:
