20 of the Most Important Things You Should Know About Your Church

by: Will Mancini

Below you will find what I believe to be 20 very important, if not the most important things you should know about your church. Keep in mind these are things to measure about your church as an organization.  (This is NOT the top things to measure in terms of individual spiritual formation.)  I have told pastors for a long time I wouldn’t consider pastoring again unless I had the congregation’s commitment to measure these 20 things every two years.

But first the backstory…

For the last 12 years, the Auxano team has developed, used and refined a survey designed completely around the culture, vision  and strategic mid-term decision-making priorities of the church. I have led this process by turning over and inside out every possible church survey I could find. After about five years I felt like we had a good template to start with as we helped local churches with their specific needs and challenges.

We  have never advertised and I have never even blogged about this product. Why?  Despite its incredible benefit to our church clients we did not have the capacity to offer the service to churches unless they were engaged in our core experience called the Vision Pathway. The desire to bring this to more churches eventually led me to LifeWay Research. We have worked with them over the past year to bring the best survey to local churches that has ever been designed for YOUR LOCAL CHURCH.

Here is what we measure:

#1: Percent of new attenders in prior two years

#2: Guest percentage

#3: Profile of new attenders and guest including reason for attending

#4 Age of the church vs. age of the community

#5 Age of church vs. the age of new attenders in the prior two years

#6 Spiritual growth satisfaction

#7 Sense of connection to the church

#8 Giving patterns

#9 Adult conversion percentage

#10 Influence of ministries

#11 Group assimilation percentage

#12 Group assimilation obstacle identification

#13 Assimilation rate for groups and membership (if applicable)

#14 Serving assimilation percentage

#15 Serving assimilation obstacles

#16 Invitation activity

#17 Invitation obstacles

#18 Total assimilation percentages

#19 Strategic direction question cluster one

#20 Strategic direction question cluster two

What other things would you include on this list? The tool we use to get this info is what we call the RealTime Survey. Feel free to download our PDF about the survey by clicking here.

If you are interested in learning more, fill out this form and I’ll make sure one of my team reaches out to you.

 

Read more from Will here

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Will Mancini

Will Mancini

Will Mancini wants you and your ministry to experience the benefits of stunning, God-given clarity. As a pastor turned vision coach, Will has worked with an unprecedented variety of churches from growing megachurches and missional communities, to mainline revitalization and church plants. He is the founder of Auxano, creator of VisionRoom.com and the author of God Dreams and Church Unique.

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