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Natural Church Development (NCD)

Natural Church Development (NCD)

How healthy is your parish? How can we realize our potential to grow? What are the barriers to growth?

“The kingdom of God is as if someone would scatter seed on the ground, and would sleep and rise night and day, and the seed would sprout and grow, he does not know how. The earth produces of itself, first the stalk, then the head, then the full grain in the head. But when the grain is ripe, at once he goes in with his sickle, because the harvest has come.” (Mark 4.26-29)

How do we measure the health of a church?

Natural Church Development (NCD) is a like an annual check-up on the health of a church. It’s been used in over 70,000 churches on six continents. The NCD process focuses on eight quality characteristics of healthy, growing churches, allowing us to measure and then shape our ministry to improve our overall health. This video gives more information about NCD:

What are the characteristics of a healthy, growing church?

According to research by NCD, there are eight quality characteristics in all healthy, growing churches, whatever culture surrounds them. Pay attention to the adjective for each one; that’s what really makes the difference.

  1. Empowering leadership

Leaders — clergy and laypeople — consider one of their most important roles to equip, support, motivate and mentor individuals to become all that God wants them to be.

  1. Gift-oriented ministry

God has gifted every Christian with talents and abilities, and healthy churches help their members identify these gifts and integrate them into ministries that match their gifts.

  1. Passionate spirituality

Although passionate spirituality is expressed in widely different ways in different churches, healthy churches are full of people who live out their faith daily with commitment, fire and enthusiasm.

  1. Effective structures

The structures of the church serve as a means to an end, working to allow the work of the church to move forward.

  1. Inspiring worship

Different churches worship in different styles, but in healthy churches the worship service is an inspiring experience for those who attend.

  1. Holistic small groups

In healthy churches, individuals find intimate community, practical help and spiritual interaction in small groups.

  1. Need-oriented evangelism

Healthy churches share the gospel in a way that meets the needs of non-Christians, without being manipulative.

  1. Loving relationships

In healthy churches, members feel that they are loved and valued, and the churches tend to be characterized by laughter and joy.

The key to growth is the quality of the church, measured through each of these eight characteristics. This quality is the root, and quantity (increased church attendance) is the fruit.

The minimum factor

Imagine the life of the church as a wooden bucket, with each of these characteristics forming one of the vertical staves. As you can see, the height of the shortest stave will determine the total amount of water the bucket can hold. We are only as strong as our weakest link, only as healthy as our shortest stave.

We call the shortest characteristic the “minimum factor.” By focusing on measuring and then improving the minimum factor, supported by the characteristics that come easiest to us, we will increase the health and capacity for growth.

“All-by-itself” growth

Even our youngest members knows what a houseplant needs to grow: soil, sun, water and a big enough container to allow for growth. When we provide the right balance of these things, God causes the growth to occur; it happens “all by itself.” When a church has all eight quality characteristics in place, God causes growth in that church. It happens “all by itself.”

The theology behind this growth in Natural Church Development is simple. God wants the church to grow. God wants people to come to understand that God loves them, and God wants people to learn to exercise their faith in their daily lives, to be co-creators with God in the work of transforming this world into the kingdom of God.

What we have to do to see this growth is simple: we need to remove the obstacles that are in God’s way. The Natural Church Development process will allow us to identify the obstacles to growth and give us a process to help us develop plans to move them out of the way.

Benefits of NCD

    • It’s an objective, scientific tool that allows us to measure our performance in areas that are often difficult to measure.
    • It’s supported by trained facilitators from the Diocese who will guide you through the process.
    • Churches that participate show a consistent improvement in the eight quality characteristics of healthy congregations and an overall improvement in congregational health.
    • The size of participating congregations around the world increased by an average of 51% over the first 30 months of the program.
    • “Transfer growth” (people who join from other churches) decreased in participating churches, while the percentage of “conversion growth” (people who have no previous Christian involvements) increased.
    • The workload of participating parishioners, and especially of church leaders (lay and staff), decreased, as the church was able to focus its efforts on specific goals.

    For more information, contact David Krause, Consultant in Congregational Development, at dkrause@toronto.anglican.ca or 416-363-6021 (1-800-668-8932).