Your church has a lot on its plate. You’re planning worship services, getting budgets ready, building relationships with your neighbors, etc. But the most important of the items on your plate is making disciples. Jesus’ last command to the church was to “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20). Discipleship is at the core of every church’s mission. Fail at that, and not much else matters.
But how do we know if we’re fulfilling this important mission?
More than a decade ago, Dallas Willard made an astute observation of the church. Most churches measure the wrong things. “We measure things like attendance and giving, but we should be looking at more fundamental things like anger, contempt, honesty, and the degree to which people are under the thumb of their lusts,” he writes. “Those things can be counted, but not as easily as offerings.”
Willard suggested there are three reasons church leaders don’t measure these spiritual qualities: 1) What they usually discover when they do isn’t worth bragging about; 2) People must be willing to be assessed; and 3) Many churches don’t have the right tools to do so.
Developing tools to assess spiritual growth can be difficult. It’s hard to measure the application of abstract Christian concepts like faith, love, and sacrifice. It’s tough, but it’s not impossible.
In this article, you’ll learn how your church can create a self-assessment tool that can show congregants where they’re growing and where they’re not. In the process, it’ll show you the strengths and weaknesses of your church’s discipleship process. You’ll learn in this article:
- Why spiritual growth assessments are so important
- How to define the areas you want to measure
- How to assess those areas
- What to do with your results
Why Spiritual Growth Assessments are So Important
Our society measures everything. We check our weight, keep track of our financial fitness, and follow our children’s academic performance.
Yet most people don’t measure the single most important area of their lives—the vitality of their relationship with God. On a corporate level, that means most churches have very little insight into how they’re doing in this vital part of their ministry.
If we don’t know how effective we are at making disciples, we can’t improve. Many leaders shy away from proper assessments because they fear they will uncover too many weak and immature Christians. But that’s the wrong way to look at it. Assessments are just the beginning. Once we see where our congregants are, we can help them take the steps necessary to get where they need to be.
Defining What You Want to Assess
You can’t start crafting a spiritual growth assessment without knowing where you want to head. That means you need a clear picture of what a disciple should look like in your ministry context. You want to make sure you’re assessing the right characteristics.
So, search the scriptures to see what they say about what a Christ-follower should be like. You may think you have this down already but don’t settle for what you think you know. Take a fresh look at what the Bible says on this topic.
Don’t do this alone, either. Gather a team of leaders in your church to discuss what you’re finding in scripture.
Also, examine your mission, vision, and core values. What would congregants be like if they lived these out in your communities? As you study the Bible and these church documents, list the characteristics you’re discovering.
Generally, you’ll want to think about assessing the following types of elements.
- Spiritual disciplines: What are the regular habits that a growing disciple should demonstrate? For example, you may have prayer, Bible study, giving, worship, etc., on your list.
- Character traits: What are the personal characteristics you expect a growing Christian to show? You could turn to several lists of character traits throughout the Bible, including the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), the Beatitudes (Matthew 5:3-12), and the Armor of God (Ephesians 6:14-17). Or you could lean on the characteristics that Paul tells Christians to “clothe yourself with” in Colossians 3:12-14. Some of these characteristics overlap, but all represent important pieces of a Christlike identity.
- Ministry/missional involvement: What should growing Christians do? Think about the activities you’d expect from disciples in your congregation. These could include worship attendance, small group attendance and participation, volunteer behaviors, personal evangelism, etc.
You may have other categories to add to the list, but most of what you’ll want to assess will likely fit into these three broad categories.
As you brainstorm these characteristics, consider what others have included in their spiritual growth assessments. For example, check out Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life Health Assessment and Lifeway Christian Resources’ Spiritual Growth Assessment. See what items they include and consider whether you want to as well.
Discerning How to Assess Characteristics
This might be the toughest part of the process. It’s not easy to assess many of these characteristics, particularly the more abstract ones like faith, love, etc. But here are a few suggestions on how to get started. Again, you can look at a number of online examples to get an idea about how others do it.
- Gather a team. Like most of the other steps in this post, you want others to help you think through this. You’ll need the additional brain power!
- Define each characteristic clearly. You need a clear and concise definition of what you’re trying to assess.
- Develop assessment questions. Probably the two most common ways to do this are through either self-reflective questions that ask congregants to reflect upon their behaviors or the Likert scale that asks them to rate their agreement or frequency of behaviors.
Here are examples for both when assessing the characteristic of patience:
— Think about a recent situation where you felt your patience was tested. How did you respond, and what did you learn from the experience about your ability to remain calm and composed?”
–On a scale of 1 to 5, how often do you find yourself remaining patient and calm when faced with delays or challenges?”
– 1 = Never
– 2 = Rarely
– 3 = Sometimes
– 4 = Often
– 5 = Always
It’s okay to include open-ended questions in the assessment (as in the first example above). Just realize that doing so will require more work in scoring the assessment and will take respondents more time to answer.
- Design your tool. You can create a paper or PDF version of the assessment, which will likely be quicker to produce. You can also leverage the web to develop a digital version that would be easier to distribute and tabulate results. You might be able to create a simple version of an assessment with ready-made products like Google Forms.
- Try it out. Let your team test it out. Make sure the questions are clear and effective.
- Distribute it. You can distribute the assessment through your small groups and/or Sunday school classes. This approach will simplify tracking participation and provide individuals with a group setting for discussing and processing their results. For people not involved in a group, you can point people to the assessment during your worship service.
Next Steps After Assessment
Assessments will do no good to your congregants or your church if you discard them once congregants complete them. Instead, provide some next steps for discipleship for congregants based on what they learn from the assessment. Make sure that in any area that you show congregants a weakness in, you give them ways to improve.
Also, take some time to look at tabulated results throughout your entire congregation. Check for any weak spots in discipleship areas across the church. Are there specific character traits consistently lacking? Are there broad struggles with certain spiritual disciplines? These may provide insights that could turn into a future sermon series or discipleship initiative.
You can also use digital tools like MissionInsite to better understand your broader community and to compare and contrast what you discover with what you find in your congregation.
If you’re looking for ways to take your church’s discipleship to the next level, see our FREE guide, Season of Renewal: Creating Impactful Fall Retreats for Your Church, for a step-by-step guide to creating a new retreat.
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