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The Natural Church Development Survey

A Natural Church Development survey has been created to enable individual churches to be measured in each of these eight areas. Questionnaires are filled out by 30 active, involved lay persons and by the pastor. The data from these questionnaires is entered into a computer program with a special connection that enables this data to be compared to the data previously entered from ALL the Christian churches in the U.S. that have ever taken the survey. The results are then computed and can be printed out so the church can easily see their strengths and weaknesses in each of these eight areas.

The survey was designed by Christoph Schalk, a social scientist and pyschologist, who drafted the new questionaire with rigorous standards for objectivity, reliability and validity, and used approved methods from social science for the analysis of the data. This allows the results of the survey to be based on sound scientific research. This research project was one of the most comprehensive studes on the causes of church growth ever undertaken. Churches from a total of 32 countries participated. The survey questionaire, which was to be completed by 30 members of each church, was translated into 18 languages. This research provides worldwide scientifically verifiable answer to the question, "What church growth principles are true, regardless of culture and theological persuasion?"

The survey questions do not ask members to "appraise" the church, but to describe "actual behavior." Each church's responses are compared to the roughly 4 million previously collected answers and creates a church profile. NADEI processes the surveys and returns the church profile, complete with graphs, showing what the church members' answers determined was the minimum factor. This then gives the church a starting point for building the quality of their church. A trained coach then works with the church as they set goals and intentionally seek to improve their minimum factor.

The survey kit includes:

• 1 Pastor's questionaire
• 30 Lay questionaires and instructions on how to choose the 30 people
•  Instructions for the most efficient way to get the questionaires filled out
• 1 copy of The ABC's of Natural Church Development
• 1 copy of The Implementation Guide to Natural Church Development

The kit costs $175.00 and can be ordered by calling the NADEI ResourceCenter at (269) 471-8303.