Growing Healthy

by Jeff Bills

One of the discoveries I made while on sabbatical in January was a tool called Natural Church Development (NCD). While I had heard a little bit about NCD I wanted to talk with a pastor that had used this tool to hear firsthand about the experience. Steve Donat, senior pastor of Moorestown United Methodist, has been involved in NCD both at his church and more recently as a “coach” for other churches using NCD. Steve’s enthusiasm and experience with NCD convinced me to have our Leadership Team look into NCD. I invited Dr. Doug Ruffle, who is on the Greater New Jersey ministry staff as director of church development, to make a presentation, which ultimately resulted in a unanimous decision to utilize the NCD tool.

The concept begins with the premise that church health not church growth should be the aim. If a church is healthy, then growth will happen “all by itself.” What the Leadership Team really appreciated was that health is not measured in terms of programs offered or the size of the congregation or its ability to make budget, as is so often the case when churches are being evaluated. Instead, NCD looked at more than 40,000 churches worldwide and identified eight “quality characteristics” that emerged in vital, alive … healthy churches:

1. Empowering Leadership
2. Gift-Based Ministry
3. Passionate Spirituality
4. Effective Structures
5. Inspiring Worship Service
6. Holistic Small Groups
7. Need-Oriented Evangelism
8. Loving Relationships

NCD provides assessment tools to help determine how effective we are in each of these areas. A group of 30 HOPE members (that number was given by NCD as the number needed for accuracy for a church our size) were selected to fill out an evaluation form to help determine which of these areas HOPE is doing well and which need improvement. Once the assessment results come back we will be putting together a “church health team” that will work on strategies for strengthening those areas of our ministry that are currently the weakest.

Our prayer is that a year from now, HOPE Church will have experienced both numerical growth and also that we will have grown increasing healthy as a community of faith. Please lift this process in prayer and look for updates as we move forward. If you have any questions or comments about this process, please feel free to contact me. I would be happy to talk with you about it.

Click here to return.