Why Natural Church Development?

Each member, even the pastor, can see only part of the total reality of the church life. Each one of us has personal favorites. As we think of our church some wish to see more improvements or changes in the worship style and format. Others would like to see the building itself improved, expanded, redecorated and furnished. Another group is eager to go on the street corners and do more evangelism, reach the community. There are few “small group” enthusiasts. Pastor thinks that empowering and training more leaders will solve our needs. The different preferences are obvious even when we come to our Board meetings. Yet, only networking perspectives of many individuals will result in an accurate picture.
This is the main purpose of the Natural Church Development plan –assessing strength and growth areas, exposing urgent needs while encouraging to use and build on strengths to improve vulnerable; enabling to pull together all the fractions and all different interests into a teamwork, and prioritizing what’s important at the moment.
A year ago we did our first evaluation and obtained an objective picture of our church health at the time. We worked faithfully on areas that needed improvements – at South the Loving Relationships, at North the Small Groups; both churches needed a process of Spiritual Gifts discovery to provide opportunities for ministry, not neglecting other vital quality characteristics of the church life – Leadership development, introducing visual enhancements to our worship, developing the church choir, improving and updating our facilities, introducing the groups and prayer meetings at home, preaching to appeal to and to challenge the passionate spirituality. Some of the essential areas were less invested in – we have not done any evangelistic work for the needs of the community around.
Many small victories took place in the past year. Many small changes added to the momentum. People themselves changed as our church is not frozen in a status quo. It is time to observe the trends again, to see where we grew and where we overlooked the need to grow. April 29 @ North & May 6 @ South we will invite 30 people from each congregation to stay after the church for 15 min and to complete the NCD survey. Personal invitations will be sent to individuals selected to participate in diagnosing the church health.
Meanwhile – do not forget what our goal is: becoming a Church where spiritual leaders facilitate inspiring, genuine and participatory WORSHIP, where spiritually gifted people minister the Good News to the needs of the community, where passionate personal spiritually is expressed through loving relationships, where functional and effective structures assist community development & discipleship through groups.