Or what do you do after taking the Congregational Vitality Assessment
by the Rev. Ken Howard
So your leadership team has taken the Congregational Vitality Assessment. You’ve got your diagnostic scores and recommendations in hand, and you’re asking yourselves the question:
Now what?
The next step is to do a Missional Assessment: a seven step process to validate and help your congregation improve its vitality by leveraging its strengths to offset its weaknesses and more effectively engage the missional opportunities and challenges emerging in the neighborhoods you serve.
Here are the steps we recommend:
- Review CVA results and recommendations with congregational leadership and with the congregation. Identify your congregation’s 2-3 areas of greatest vitality strength and 2-3 areas of greatest vitality weakness.
- Conduct a demographic assessment of the missional opportunities and challenges in the community your congregation serves. Identify the 2-3 greatest missional opportunities and the 2-3 greatest missional challenges.
- Find consensus around greatest strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. Select 1-2 of each.
- Identify the areas of congregational vitality strength that you can leverage to effectively engage missional opportunities and challenges in the community, and to effectively address areas of congregational vitality weakness.
- Identify strategies to engage identified community opportunities and challenges, and address identified areas of vitality.
- Determine which strategies you feel capable pursuing yourselves and which you might need help with.
- Implement strategies. Start small, experiment, and build on successes.
The steps may seem simple at first glance. And in a way, they are fairly straightforward. But if you are looking for a quick and easy fix for your congregation’s vitality issues, you’re going to be disappointed, because the process of vitality improvement is neither quick nor easy.
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