Our pastor wants to do some sort of church wide assessment or survey to get a snapshot of our congregation’s spiritual health. What are some of the best options out there? We are willing to pay some for it, but not an exorbitant amount. Here would be the perfect solution for us:
- Individuals fill out a survey online or on paper (preferably both options would be available for our non-techy folks).
- The individual gets some sort of individual analysis done with strengths (and maybe weaknesses) with possible suggestions how they can continue to grow.
- The results are automatically aggregated so that church leadership can get a sense of the overall level of Christian maturity, strengths, and weaknesses for the organization. Perhaps there is also a congregational analysis that is returned after the survey is completely.
- Obviously, we want everyone to be able to remain anonymous to church staff while getting their own individual results and feedback from the assessment.
- This assessment should be fairly theologically robust. For example, we don’t just want to count how many times people come to church a month, how much they tithe, and if they have daily personal devotions. Those would be good things to know, but it needs to get beyond typical measures. Things like family habits and rituals or how often they incorporate faith at work (or if they think it matters) would be things that might help as well.
- We want to be able to do this on a regular basis, like every year or two.
Does anyone have any suggestions?
Two things come to mind–but I’m not sure how much each would fill their needs. Natural Church Development is good, as is US Congregation Life Survey. NCD has been doing the rounds in ELCA circles lately, and it has a the widest following across the Christian spectrum that I have seen. US Congregational Life has some of the basic demographics that you were looking to avoid, but it also has a lot more.
Maybe this will help…let me know if you need more.