Natural Church Development Report 2007
At a Grace Church council retreat in March, Jan Nesse, Assistant to the Bishop of the ELCA Northwest Region 1, introduced a church health program called Natural Church Development or NCD. The council approved the use of the program at the May meeting and formed a NCD committee consisting of Pastor Howell, Sue Giaimo, Sarah Peterson, Tom Pfaff, and Indi Leino, council representative. This committee began in earnest, working with a NCD Coach, Pastor Richard Hayes of Lord of Life Lutheran Church in Duvall. We first learned about NCD and than the steps used to implement it. The basic principle behind NCD is that there are eight quality characteristics of growing churches which if allowed to develop more fully will result in a healthy and growing church. A NCD survey was taken by 36 members of Grace at the end of June. The results from this survey showed the relative strength or weakness of each of these eight characteristics.
The minimum factor or maximum leverage point for our congregation is Passionate Spirituality. Three sharing sessions held in August and September allowed time for the congregation to discuss the NCD program, share results of the survey, and gather both members’ reactions to the results and ideas on how to improve our individual and corporate passionate spirituality. The committee shared with the congregation that passionate spirituality represents the theological core of the matter in church growth: the life of faith is a genuine relationship with Jesus Christ. During the congregational focus groups it was determined that most of the participants felt that if they had 1) greater Biblical familiarity, 2) improved prayer life and 3) greater intimacy with God and others Christians that passionate spirituality would improve.. The committee took the input from the congregation and crafted two initiatives to address these areas for growth.
At the start of the new church year, we began a Sunday morning preservice prayer and praise time in the sanctuary from 8:30 to 8:50 AM. All worshippers are invited to join with us in this prayer time or simply sit in the beautiful sanctuary for some quiet reflective time. Then, at the beginning of the calendar year, we kicked-off a “Tree of Life Bible Challenge” to provide a way for members to achieve greater familiarity with God’s Word. At the back of the sanctuary is a bare tree to which leaves are added upon completion of reading a book of the Bible or a Bible story. We hope our tree will soon appear to bloom to life with many leaves as we complete more and more readings. We pray that the Lord use this program to help us all in our spiritual growth and church growth as we continue throughout 2008.
