Seven years ago in an editorial for this magazine, I quoted the following passage from Prof. Reg Bibby’s then latest book, Restless Churches. “I am convinced,” he wrote, “that the resources and the will exist for ministry to take place that touches people who are not actively involved in the nation’s churches. … What is required, however, is a clear-cut strategy that is informed by sound research and sound congregational input.”
Nearly five years have passed since then and this issue of the Record unveils publicly for the first time the results of such research that was both based on, and requires further, congregational input.
Complied from the profiles of 78 congregations by the Institute for Natural Church Development, a picture of the Presbyterian Church has emerged that puts some flesh on Dr. Bibby’s comments.
Natural Church Development, NCD for short, is a benchmarking tool. Benchmarking is something we all do every day, whether we are comparing statistics of denominational income and church attendance or checking the performance of our RRSP funds against other similar funds.
A lot of benchmarking in the church has been rather crude: Last year’s congregational attendance was up or down by so many people. It doesn’t tell us anything about the whys behind the numbers. Snowstorms? A better ski season? A major employer closed down?
Benchmarking has proved a useful tool in business. Companies try to find the best practices among themselves by looking at not only their performance in terms of the bottom line, but also how employees rate their working environment.
This is essentially what author Diana Butler Bass has documented in her book Christianity for the Rest of Us. Her research tries to set out the best common practices she found in dynamic churches from a variety of denominations and sizes across the United States.
In a recent talk at Rosedale, Toronto, she said: “All churches have practices—the things that they do. Often, however, those practices are taken for granted. They’re assumed. This study speculated that renewed mainline congregations paid attention to these practices. They assumed nothing.”
The NCD survey results suggest that some congregations have not been paying attention to some practices. For instance, as a group, the 2,400 Presbyterian church members surveyed indicated they are reading their Bible and praying quite a bit less than the average of other Christians in Canada. Unsurprisingly, then, they tend not to share their faith with people inside and outside the church as much as others do.
(Presbyterians are not alone in this. Anglicans and Uniteds have a similar problem in Canada, possibly suggesting some larger cultural tendencies among the predominantly white, Anglo-Saxon demographic of these churches.)
There is a great deal that is encouraging in this, however. The church now has some data to work with. Each congregation participating in the surveys will have to develop its own responses. But the mere fact that congregations have begun to even measure some factors is important.
As Bibby noted, any strategy to deal with the obvious problem of the denomination’s declining numbers requires sound research. Next comes the congregational input.
There are lots of programs and good research to help congregations address their own issues, from the Alban Institute’s work on congregational size to Kennon Callahan’s Twelve Keys to an Effective Church. (Dr. Callahan presented to the Synod of Southwestern Ontario just 18 months ago.)
NCD argues that these various programs will only be effective when the underlying issues are addressed. Some may contest that, but at least something is happening and if this sparks some serious discussion and debate, so much the better.
As Dr. Butler Bass said: “It isn’t just about what you do, or putting in a fancy new program, but how well you enable connections to occur within your congregations. How are your teaching practices, how are you connecting those practices … creating for people a condition in which they can know God?”
The bottom line?
“How do we intentionally engage our practices so that people can choose Jesus’ way as a meaningful way of life?”
