What is your church great at? What support would your congregation like to grow in faith, share their faith and serve their local community? The Church Development Tool can help you find out – and then point you to simple, tried and tested resources that will help you act on what you discover.
The Church Development Tool is a short anonymous survey you ask your worshipping community to complete. You then get a simple report that gives you a clear picture of demographics, discipleship and evangelism in your church.
The survey results help you to look at your community with fresh eyes and find the opportunities for growth. This could be by building on strengths or addressing gaps. We then match you with resources that will help you with your chosen area of focus.
If you want, you can contact your diocesan staff for discipleship or parish support for help interpreting the results and choosing what to focus on.
Overall, the tool helps you look at ‘depth’ as well as ‘breadth’, helping you understand how people are living out their faith and growing in discipleship. This can complement other statistics such as attendance numbers.
Webinar: Getting started with the Church Development Tool
Watch a recording our webinar, ‘Getting Started with the Church Development Tool’.
How could it help? Some examples
“The PCC has discussed the results and is using them for refreshing our Mission Action Plan, which is excellent.”
Feedback from user of Church Development Tool in 2021
If the survey results reveal that people in your church have a strong interest in engaging in wider community activities, this could help your planning because it might mean you could consider offering space to incorporate more of these activities into your church’s mission work.
If the survey results show that not everyone agrees ‘I know how my faith connects with everyday life’, then you might think about if you want to consider how this could be talked about more, or consider following an Everyday Faith journey together (from the Church of England’s new Everyday Faith portal).
There is a question about whether respondents are involved in leading small groups. If you see several responses of ‘no, but would like to’, you could think about how you could support people to come forward as small group leaders and how you could train or mentor them to help with this.
How it works
This year’s Church Development Tool survey has now launched and is ready to use.
Church leaders can to log into AChurchNearYou.com as an editor, and choose ‘Church Development Tool’ from the editor menu. There you will be able to find a choice of ways to invite your worshipping community to respond:
- a link to email people, to ask them to complete the survey online
- a printable PDF poster with a QR code to the survey, to display for people to scan with a smartphone to respond online
- a printable PDF of the survey, for people who prefer to respond on paper
We will also supply suggested text and slides to help you explain about the Church Development Tool to your worshipping community and invite them to take part, to use if you wish.
Surveys completed online are automatically counted. Someone at your church will just need to input results from any paper surveys into AChurchNearYou.com – anyone who is an editor for the church on AChurchNearYou.com can do this.
Once the responses are in, AChurchNearYou.com then generates a report for you with graphs, that you can view on screen, download as PDF or print.
Full instructions for AChurchNearYou.com editors.
Get a demonstration
Watch a recording of our webinar ‘Getting Started with the Church Development Tool’.
If you are not already a registered approved editor on AChurchNearYou.com, sign up now
so that you will be able to use the Church Development Tool.
Please note: People won’t need to be an AChurchNearYou.com editor to answer the Church Development Tool survey.
