Being in church leadership is no easy task. You are constantly having to make decisions that could potentially affect your entire congregation. And even though you are making decisions after careful consideration and much prayer, sometimes you can still second guess yourself. You might regularly ask yourself questions like:
- Does our congregation truly grasp the gospel message?
- Is our church prioritizing the right things?
- Do people feel a sense of belonging here?
It’s hard to know what your congregation is thinking about your church, and the job you are doing as leaders, unless you ask them, and a great way to get some feedback is through a church assessment. The easiest way to assess your church is through a church survey.
Most of the people in your congregation will be more than willing to complete a church survey if it is convenient, not too time consuming, and if it presented in the right way. Here are some tips for how to accomplish this.
A Convenient Church Assessment
If you want maximum participation from your church members, you need to make the survey readily accessible to everyone in your congregation. This might mean making it available in several different formats. You can email the survey to your church’s email list. You can also have the survey available for completion at church gatherings on computers or tablets, or even on paper.
Provide your congregation with multiple opportunities to complete the survey, and make sure to have someone on staff who is willing to help those who might be having trouble completing it.
A Brief Church Assessment
The church assessment you present to your congregation should also not be too time-consuming to complete. Ideally, it should take people no longer than 15-20 minutes to fill out. Multiple choice questions are a great way to get a lot of feedback in a short amount of time. However, with multiple choice questions, you need to make sure that the answer options are well thought out. In other words, you don’t want to present a question, and then not give participants good options from which to choose.
As you build your survey, ask the questions that will give you the most insight into your congregation. You’ll want to gather basic demographic information, and also questions that will reveal your church’s perceived strengths and weaknesses.
If you are having trouble coming up with the right questions to ask, you might want to consider purchasing a ready-made church survey from an organization like VitalChurch Ministry that specializes in church assessments.
Presenting the Reasons for a Church Assessment
How you present the church assessment to your congregation can go a long way in encouraging participation. Your congregation should be assured that you’re doing this because you value their feedback and want to find ways to serve them better.
Your congregation should also be assured that all feedback will be kept anonymous. This will encourage participants to be candid in their answers, which will provide you with more accurate, and therefore more useful, information.
