Most church development ideas begin with the health of the church. As it is a widely known reality that only a healthy thing can grow, so in order to grow a church must take concern of it’s members. It must also take worry that it is going strong in the society around it or community.
Your very first task is going to be evaluating your church. It includes self analysis and knowing where the church actually stands in the community. This means you need to find out what the good qualities of your church is and what the bad qualities are. The task of evaluation becomes more difficult when the church does not want to come out of its own self image and does not want to step into the reality of the actual way it is seen. It may also be the case that the perception which the church holds about itself at present may have been the reality of the past but is no longer truthful.
The things we ought look for in our evaluation include how the community sees our church as it related to our service and reputation. Also, many congregations tend to be caught up in the numbers game when it comes to their evaluation. They don’t look much deeper to find out the hidden realities, but instead just decide the church’s image must be great on the basis of the number of the footfalls that a church gets on an average over a period of time.
Here, in this step, the clergy or who so ever is conducting the evaluation survey must talk to its attendees and get to know their point of view of the church in terms of cleanliness, its services and other things. Here, along with the evaluation, the church will as well get to know if the teachings the church is trying to give are being received by the individuals or if the message is getting lost along the way.
Similarly, the church clergy or the staff will too get to know whether the services they are providing are up to the mark or if it needs to be upgraded to match the way of the current times. Also, whether some new and significant service needs to be introduced into the church and how effective the current services are to the people of the church already.
Also, during the process, it is crucial for the church to know what role that their church is playing as the leader of the society and what kind of relationships it enjoys with the people of the community. Normally in order to hook all the individuals of the community, a church keeps on organizing some kind of events or other functions, but even as successful as these events may have seemed, they can only be known for sure through the evaluation process.
The relationships of the church are different with different segments of the people. It can as well be the case that a church is popular among a particular segment and the other segment does not even know about it. Hence, it has to work in an entirely new area and interact with all the other segments for the evaluation to be more accurate.
At last, the evaluation is not a onetime process, but it has to be done again and again over a period of time to know the truthful status of the church as it will always keep on altering with the time. And accordingly, the church has to plan for the growth ideas and implement them, so that it will keep on growing and not be stagnant.