What was your motivation to do the Church Life Survey?
Since our parish twinned with another parish last year, we decided to repeat the survey we did in 2022 in the new parish to get a sense of the experiences, desires, and hopes of the parishioners.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church?
The leadership team now has a solid foundation to build upon as we continue to share our vision and introduce new initiatives with the twinned parish.
What was your motivation to do the Church Life Survey?
We had not done a survey for some years. I am a relatively new pastor in the church. With the blessing of our leadership team, I was interested in gaining a better understanding of strengths, growth areas, concern areas and so on. What I was observing at one level could be corroborated with the survey or otherwise.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church?
I've been working with our leadership team on analysing the results. My ministry coach has offered helpful insights as well. The result gave us 3 future priorities to work on for the next 12 months, which is great. Each Sunday, I present briefly an aspect of the result, and fuller descriptions in our church news, using the graphs and data. I am hearing people are grateful to have results rather than the scenario of doing a survey and hearing nothing more from it, which happened in the past.
What was your motivation to do the Church Life Survey?
Our plan has been to complete a Church Life Survey each year so that leadership has up-to-date data on the spiritual health of the Lord's people here. This data then helps us to shape areas for investment in the coming year/s. For example, data from 2021 showed that only 2% of our people recorded much spiritual growth in the last 12 months from personal devotion. This led to us launching our new campaign two years ago. A campaign to increase the personal Bible reading of every person at church to four or more times a week.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church?
Yes. Always very helpful. I’m planning to take our latest survey results to our Parish Council over the summer to give us reasons for thankfulness and help us shape future planning.
What was your motivation to do the Church Life Survey?
We took part in the Church Life Survey as part of our Senior Pastor's participation in the Arrow Leadership Development Program. We decided it would be helpful to obtain an anonymous overview of how people perceived what was happening for us as a church, and also understand the demographics of our church community.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church?
It was helpful to see the areas where people felt invested and where people may have felt a disconnection, or that there was room for growth. We have just received the results from our 2024 survey and are keen to compare the results from the two years and see what shifts and changes have occurred, if any.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church? How have you used the results, learned from them, etc.?
It was helpful to capture group perspectives on the church and to consider what focuses to have e.g. evangelism and better articulating values etc. Being the first time we've done it I am more intently interested in seeing how results compare the second time from the first. We intend to take part again soon.
What was your motivation to do the Church Life Survey?
Our church has had a long-standing commitment to honest self-assessment as a means of helping lead our church into greater fruitfulness.
We also are deeply committed to listening to and understanding our church community.
Regularly conducting Church Life Surveys has become an invaluable resource and strategy that we rely on to listen to our church, to celebrate how God is at work and to identify key areas to focus on in the coming year.
How has it been helpful to you as a leader, or as a church?
The Church Life Survey is helpful in providing a thorough snapshot of our church at a point in time. As leaders in the church, we often have a correct 'finger on the pulse' of the life of our church and it is encouraging to see that confirmed with hard data. Just as true, however, is that our perception of how things are don't always necessarily match what is the current reality. Having hard data from the Church Life Survey helps us plan, strategise and prioritise based on how things really are in the life of our church. Particularly helpful for us is noting any changes that has occurred over the year since our last Survey, which provides some real-world evaluation on the effectiveness of our previous year's programs and priorities. For us, the Church Life Survey results have been instrumental in then shaping the following year's theme, focus and strategic priorities in response to hearing from our church community.
