St. John's ELCA

Vision Team Report to the Congregation

St. John’s Vision Team has been hard at work and prayer over the last 8 months gathering and interpreting information from both inside and outside St. John’s in order to recommend actions to the Congregation for the future growth of St. John’s.

We have gathered information for outreach purposes using the Percept Demographic Study which among other things has helped us understand the primary life concerns and preferred church characteristics of those living in our mission area (Dutchess County). A detailed 4 page report has been delivered to Council and Mission Team chairs and is available for anyone who wishes a copy. See the church office or any member of the Vision Team.

Our Team’s most significant efforts to date have revolved around measuring the health of St. John’s ministries using the Natural Church Development (NCD) process. NCD has been used by over 45,000 churches in 70 countries on 6 continents over the past 10 years to improve the growth of their congregations. The Vision Team identified a number of churches in our local area that have been using NCD with success for several years and NCD has the strong endorsement of the Metro NY Synod as well as the ELCA.

NCD is based on the principle that a healthy congregation is a growing congregation. Developed by German researchers, eight characteristics where identified, and a series of survey questions developed in order to assign a current quantitative measurement score for each of the characteristics in a given church. From these scores church health can be assessed and focus areas for actions to improve health can be determined.

The eight characteristics are:

The Vision Team did St. John’s initial assessment in June with the help of 30 active members (none were allowed to be active Council or Vision Team members) and Pastor Ward who each took about a 90 question survey to be returned to NCD.

Though space will not allow a complete discussion of St. John’s results here, our lowest scoring characteristic, or “minimum factor” was Passionate Spirituality. This result is fairly typical of most ELCA churches.

The Vision Team has spent the last 4 months both understanding the results and discussing ideas for action with guidance from both the NCD program and our NCD “coach”, a pastor trained to assist congregations in the NCD process.

While as of this writing there are still many details to be worked out the Vision Team is focused on several keys areas and initiatives, some of which have already started:

There is much work to be done to bring all of the above to reality and St. John’s will need the help of many and the prayers of all to accomplish this.

For those that are interested in more details about the Vision Team’s work, the NCD program or our future plans at St. John’s, please watch the weekly bulletin or the St. John’s Web site for announcements about informational sessions presented by the Team over the next couple months. You can also check out the NCD Website at www.ncd-international.org for more information.

Or as always feel free to contact any member of the Team, who are in addition to me: Chris Cuttler, Bob Deik, Steve Jones, Walt Von Dehsen, and Pastor Ward. Special thanks to Randy Johnson who has recently joined our group to help with our work on the small group’s ministry initiative.