Natural Church Development
Natural Church Development is a Biblically consistent, prayer energized, God empowered strategy to help God’s church become healthy and grow in grace and strength. It provides a systematic, natural framework for defining and applying effective principles for congregational development. It lines out an easy way for a Corps to work on Corps Growth issues one at a time.
Natural Church Development measures the 8 quality characteristics of a church:
- Empowering Leadership
- Gift Based Ministry
- Passionate Spirituality
- Functional Structures
- Inspiring Worship
- Holistic Small Groups
- Need Oriented Evangelism
- Loving Relationships
A survey of 15 – 30 members of the congregation gives the results of the quality characteristics. The goal for a healthy church is to attain a score of 65 in each of the eight essential characteristics. While working on the lowest scoring characteristic, all other church activities continue. Experience shows that other characteristics increase in scoring while the lowest characteristic is improving.
At the end of one year, the Corps conducts another survey of 30 members. Most likely, a new characteristic will show as the lowest score, but most characteristics will have increased their scores. The corps then spends the second year working on improving the new lowest scoring essential characteristics.
Here are the recommended criteria for a corps which wants to use Natural Church Development. To order a Natural Church Development Survey click here.
