A couple of survey thoughts...and results.

I’ve got to admit I’m generally not too crazy about surveys. They’re inevitably restrictive in that my answer never seems to be listed as one of the options. Also they are impersonal…I don’t like becoming a statistic. So trying do an anonymous ‘personal’ survey at church made me rather nervous. And yes the survey was deliberately restrictive. We didn’t want to fall into the ‘me-church’ problem (see previous video post) where we find out what people do or don’t like and then seek to accommodate everyone’s wish list. This would have been a disastrous mistake. Can you image Jesus handing out ‘felt need’ surveys? Can you imagine the apostles running little focus groups to work out how to make their ministry more fun and happy for everyone?

Truth and love and the glory of God are the things that should be driving all that we do in Church and all that we do as Christians. So we wanted to survey how we think we are going as a community in view of the Biblical picture of how church should be. And also survey how ‘you’ think you are going as an individual in our congregation. Now this is hard to do and kind of sets us up for a fall. But I think what we did on Sunday night, combined with our discussion groups was a very helpful exercise.

We are still distilling all the info but let me share with you a couple of the results.

We asked two questions relating to our Sunday night gatherings and genuine engagement.

Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with God?
Strong Yes 47%
Yes 48%
No 3%
Strong No 2%

Do you think our Sunday night gatherings succeed in helping people genuinely engage with each other?
Strong Yes 15%
Yes 60%
No 20%
Strong No 5%

Now in some ways you could sum up what church is all about under these themes. If we are genuinely engaging with God and each other then we’re likely to be ‘growing followers of Jesus’. So what do these results show?
Well clearly most people think we do a good job of the first, and significantly less feel we succeed in the second, and perhaps succeed as well.
It shows us there is difference of opinion amongst us about these issues. One in twenty don’t think people are being helped to genuinely engaging with God at church. One in four don’t think we are good at helping people engage well with each other.

Now of course what these results don’t show us is why people think like this…and there’s the problem with surveys.
Further info will follow as we go through all the results. But overall people seemed very pleased we spent some time doing our Spring review. 

Thanks guys for putting your thoughts into all this. 

Feel free to add your comments about how you found the whole process.