Mainline church decline is so well known in contemporary American parlance as to border on the cliché. But awareness does not always lead to response. Christian A Schwarz’s, Natural Church Development (Churchsmart Resources: Carol Stream, Illinois, 7th edition, 2006) is one place congregations have turned in order to begin to address these issues of decline and growth in a practical, tangible, and measurable way.
What makes a church grow? More than that, is it okay to admit that you might want to know the answer?
The words church growth, can, in some circles, be more frowned upon than their four-letter cousins censored from network television. Church growth can be seen as “gimmicky.” For example, my youth group years ago had “Buck-a-Friend Night,” where students could get $1 for each new friend coming to the activity.) On the one hand it may seem too secular — can God work through surveys and strategies? Add to that the celebrity mega-church examples of the thousands of people a ‘good’ church should attract and it almost seems easier to look the other way as the mainline continues its slow fade into oblivion.
In the midst of this mire, Schwarz’s book on natural church development (NCD) is an attempt to provide tangible tools to help churches. It is an attempt to provide churches with a standard for measurement of their health, and in so doing, to outline an intentional path toward increasing that health. Schwarz cautions that church growth itself should never become the motivation for church activities. The goal should be to “release the potential which God has put into every church.”
The method is based on the research of Schwarz’s team, which set out to develop the most comprehensive research project of church growth ever undertaken. The initial research, conducted between 1994-1996, included more than 1,000 churches across 32 countries on six continents and was translated into 18 languages with a total of 4.2 million responses. To date more than 40,000 congregations have used this survey to get a reading on their health, according to Schwarz (p. 18.)
The extensive surveys distilled many church qualities into eight characteristics that can help a church evaluate what NCD refers to as its quality index. (For a list of the eight quality characteristics and a brief description, see page 9.) What Schwarz’s team found was that no single factor of these eight was enough to assure a healthy or growing church. Rather, it is the interplay of these eight elements that leads toward both health and growth.
“What we found helpful about the NCD material was that it gave us something specific and objective to work on,” says Steve McLean, pastor of the Argyle United Presbyterian Church in upstate New York. “Prior to this,” he says, “it was just one person’s opinion vs. another’s about what needed our attention.” After three consecutive years of decline in worship attendance, the session of Argyle Church began to look for a way to figure out what was wrong. A colleague from the Philadelphia Presbytery suggested NCD. “The benefits have been tremendous,” McLean comments. “Using an objective instrument like this has helped our leadership identify what we need to put our greatest effort in, which has led to a unified effort of the congregation rather than just the folks who have a passion for a particular area.”
The first step in the NCD model is for 30 active members of the congregation to take a survey, the results of which score the church in each of the eight quality characteristics. These results are then presented to the church. Ed White, from the Alban Institute, has consulted with many mainline Protestant congregations as they have worked through the NCD process. “A lot of churches when they get low scores in an area want to critique the instrument,” notes White. They ask: Who filled out the survey? But once a church has the opportunity to get beyond an initial defensiveness at being critiqued, he adds, “It has been helpful and helped them to focus on the qualitative issues.”
At Argyle Church the instrument gave McLean a new way to speak to the congregation. The NCD process “created permission to talk about things and greater interest in them on the part of the congregation,” he notes. For years he had tried to talk to the congregation about evangelism, with little effect. But after the NCD survey process indicated evangelism as an area of weakness for the congregation, people began to pay attention.
Once a church has filled out the survey, the results provide the foundation from which to begin the NCD process. Each of the eight quality characteristics is measured on a scale from 0-100 (though Alban Institute’s Ed White once worked with a church that got a –4 in “passionate spirituality!”) With 50 being the median, most churches fall between 35-65 in each of the essential characteristics. One surprising finding of Schwarz’s initial research was that without exception, churches that scored 65 or over in all eight characteristics were all growing churches.
Once the eight characteristics have been evaluated, the NCD process asks the church (usually represented by the session or a task force assigned to work on NCD) to begin work on the area with the lowest score. This is referred to as the “low stave” or the minimum strategy. According to NCD, this strategy assumes that the church is blocked from growth and health by the least-developed characteristic. A barrel is their illustration. The lowest stave is what allows the water to spill out. Increasing the church’s “lowest stave” increases its capacity to grow.
“NCD allowed us to put labels on parts of church life that had been wrapped up in a vague cloud,” shares Ken Winter, pastor of Auburn Church in Northern California. Winter and Preston Saunders, associate pastor, are in the midst of working with the church elders on the fourth round of the NCD process. Winter suggests that using NCD is best as part of an ongoing process. “I think you really need to be committed to it for a couple of rounds,” he says. For Auburn Church this has meant a cycle of taking the survey every other year and using its results to help focus the members in direction and vision. “It is a tool,” adds Saunders. “We … use it as a thermometer to figure out where we are.”
McLean of Argyle Church likens the NCD process to a medical diagnosis. “Without the diagnosis,” he says, “folks are not willing to take the medicine.” Argyle Church has also embraced an ongoing process of NCD, using the minimum strategy as a point of reference. “We spent 18 months working on learning about spiritual gifts, helping people identify their gifts, and matching them to ministries (that) fit their gifts,” McLean explains. A second survey showed that the work paid off, and identified a new minimum area. “We worked on this area for 18 months, took another survey, found that we had made improvement, and are now working on a new area,” the pastor says.
The focus and practicality of this approach have proved quite helpful for many congregations that have embarked on the NCD process. But there are also those who wonder about this “focus on the negative.” The NCD materials assert that, “the minimum strategy does not teach us to concentrate on our least capable areas,” as long as nonessential ministry elements are in question. But if the least capable areas happen to coincide with the eight quality characteristics, Schwarz suggests, “as long as even just one of the quality characteristics is missing or underdeveloped, developing the strengths in another area will not help.”
Memorial Drive Church in Houston, Texas, has been working through a plan, born out of the NCD materials, for the past five years. “It has been the most helpful tool that we’ve used in articulating and getting a snapshot of who we are and a vision of where we can go,” says Pastor Dave Peterson. For Memorial Drive, the survey results were both an affirmation and a clarification. Measuring fairly well on seven of the eight quality characteristics was encouraging. Their “low stave” was not a surprise, but more a confirmation of an area they had never been able to quite figure out. But after working with this approach, which has helped Memorial Drive focus its ministry, Peterson also has some reservations. “We have become a little suspicious of the low stave thing,” he says. “There are some things that we will never do well — why not capitalize on our strengths, rather than focus on our weaknesses?”
Peterson has also been pondering the idea of growth itself. We are beginning to get suspicious of growth as a goal in and of itself,” he comments. “It can become its own idol.” The NCD materials do caution against church growth becoming the motivation for congregational activities, asserting that it is a strategy for church health, not church growth. Lately Peterson is finding himself, in conversation with others, beginning to ask a different set of questions. “It’s not about how many people can we attract here to this church — it needs to look different than that,” he suggests. “What I am realizing is that the old way of doing things has some big holes in it, but the new way is not sharply enough focused yet.”
Erin Dunigan is a seminary graduate and freelance writer/photographer living in Newport Beach, Calif.
