Church Health Assessment

We (the Middle Baptist Association) recently compiled the data from the Annual Church Profiles provided by Churches in the Association.  With no intent of being negative, pessimistic, or discouraging, the trends are not good.  For the last five years there has been a steady decline in almost every category that the ACP measures for our churches.  The exception is baptisms, and while that is positive, these baptisms are concentrated in a very few churches.  Would your church be interested in having an assessment tool that can help you measure your ministry effectiveness?  There are several advantages of assessment:

• Assessment allows an intentional evaluation of a church's effectiveness
• Assessment helps outline ministry goals and priorities
• Assessment helps provide objective metrics about your church
• Assessment helps create awareness about how churches need to direct or re-direct their energy
• Assessment demonstrates a willingness to do something about decline or plateau
• Assessment can serve to reconnect a church to New Testament values

Below are a few online resources that may help:

• http://www.mobaptist.org/church_health - this is fairly basic assessment tool that the Missouri Baptist Convention put together.  It helps the church examine five ministry areas for effectiveness.
• http://mapchurch.com/ChurchMap.aspx - this is a more involved, though excellent resource that the North American Mission Board has made available online.  MAP stands for "Missional Assessment Profiles."

We will link both of these resources to the MBA's website.  Also, I would be pleased to help your church walk through a simple process to help discover ways to increase your ministry effectiveness. 

The bottom line for me is that collectively we are losing ground, and I can't think of anything worse than doing nothing.

Blessings!

 Bobby Braswell, Jr.