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TechnoratiPastor Bill Hybels didn't give his life to the development of the local church just to gather a bunch of casual Christians, he says. He gave it to see people far from God find the love of Christ and fully devote themselves to God and what He is doing.
Expressing similar sentiments, Pastor Tim Gray of Bridge Community Church, a congregation of 400 in Leadington, Mo., says, "We're called to make disciples ... not members, not pew-sitters."
Many pastors would agree. But since the early Christian church, pastors have only had three ways to measure the spiritual growth of churchgoers and assess how effective churches were in developing Christ followers and not pew-sitters.
Those three methods were attendance, baptisms (or conversions), and resources (i.e. tithing), at least according to Cally Parkinson of Willow Creek Association.
"Those were your three ways of measuring because you really had no other way to figure out whether or not what you were doing was really helping people become increasingly intimate with Christ and increase their love for God and of others," said Parkinson, one of the leaders of WCA's Reveal research.
That is, until now.
Parkinson and a small team at WCA have recently made available to all churches what has been called a groundbreaking study that provides a "vivid picture of the 'unseen' hearts" of congregants and their spiritual growth. The Reveal Spiritual Life Survey serves as a "lens," as Parkinson explained, for pastors to be able to view where his or her congregants are spiritually.
So far, more than 500 churches and half a million congregants have taken the survey and many have found the results surprising.
Willow Creek Community Church was the first to take the survey in 2004. At that time, the influential megachurch in South Barrington, Ill., was at a crossroads, according to Parkinson, as they were in the midst of building a new 7,200-seat auditorium but was also at the end of their strategic planning cycle.
"It was like 'where is the church going next?'" Parkinson said.
Then out of what Parkinson described as a divine, extraordinary coming together of circumstances, the Reveal study was born and soon survey findings at Willow Creek and six other churches across the country rocked the megachurch.
Among the findings, what "really caught us off guard" was the discovery that involvement in church activities does not predict or drive long-term spiritual growth, Reveal's leadership stated in Reveal: Where Are You?.
Instead of the direct linear relationship between the level of participation in church activities and spiritual growth – defined as "increasing love for God and others" – that they expected, they discovered that the connection between the two is actually limited.
When the findings were presented at WCA's Leadership Summit in 2007, Pastor John Ortberg of Menlo Park Presbyterian Church said, "You could hear thousands of church leaders responding to the single finding that was to me the most important and unsettling: that as spiritual life progresses, increased involvement in church activities ceases to predict spiritual growth."
"I have rarely heard information that was such a surprise when it was announced, yet made intuitive sense to all the church leaders as soon as it sunk in," he wrote in Follow Me: What's Next For You?, which is the second book detailing the latest Reveal findings. Continue »
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