NCD Surveys and Costs
Surveys
NCD surveys are the most accurate way to discover what your church's strengths and minimum qualities are. They have been designed to an international statistical standard, and are based on specific areas of the 8 Essential Qualities which have been found from the research to be the most significant factors between growing and declining churches.
Your mentor will guide you through the process, but in brief:
The surveys have 91 questions and take about 45 minutes. They are completed by the main church leader and ideally about 30 members of the congregation who know the church well. Churches smaller than this just get everybody who is a regular member to complete them.
They can be completed, anonymously, on-line or on paper. On-line is easier. It is best for everyone to complete the surveys within the same time-frame (eg on the same day).
If churches are part of a wider grouping who wish to work together (eg Benefice, Deanery, Mission Community, or any other formal or informal grouping), each church should complete a separate survey. Working together assists strategic thinking as there are often common issues which can be identified.
Results are obtained quickly, and take the form of a series of information sheets and bar charts. Your mentor will receive these first.
The information sheets (see examples) show how the congregation has viewed itself across the 8 Essential Qualities (strengths and less strong areas) and its Trinitarian emphasis. The surveys also give detailed analysis of the results for each quality, as well as identifying and listing the 10 strongest questions and the 10 lowest scoring questions. It also identifies some key themes and attributes of the church. Your mentor will help you with discerning the results of the survey.
The results are discussed by whichever church group is overseeing the process (facilitated by the mentor). Every church is unique. Every church will have different results. Therefore every church will have its own approach to addressing the results.
The church decides on about 3 action points for the coming year that will help improve its minimum quality/theme. In deciding its 3 main action points, the approach must take into account how to use all of the 8 Essential Qualities in the decision making and delivery, so that ALL qualities improve by the process, not just the minimum one in focus.
We advise surveys to repeated about every 12-18 months.
Experience has shown that churches can make very good progress in the first 3-4 years of doing surveys, improving the qualities and showing a marked improvement in health. It gets more difficult after this as for the qualities to really improve to the level required for sustained growth, congregation members themselves need to live out all of these qualities in their lives. It isn't about 'church' organisationally deciding on things, but about personal discipleship of congregation members.
If leaders and congregation members are not prepared to change their own lives in alignment with the qualities identified, then, even after early successes, the church will sadly get stuck at a level below that which is required for sustained growth. So it would be worth checking that the whole congregation is up for the process before starting it! That is why I advise the initial presentation be heard by the whole congregation, so that everyone knows what is involved and ultimately expected.
Costs
There are no charges for initial conversations or the initial presentation. Nor is there any pressure to explore the process further after the presentation.
If you decide to proceed, there is a sliding scale of fees which will be explained during the presentation.
In short:
NCD is small organisationally, but with international significance. Years of time have been spent in research and designing the questionnaires to assist churches across the world to become healthier and grow. The majority of the fee for the surveys are helping to cover the costs of all this past and ongoing research. Some of the cost is for the time of the mentor, which can be significant.
The usual cost for an NCD survey, with all of the Mentor support that accompanies it (including presentations, meetings with leaders, meetings with whichever group is handling the process, etc) is £349. In the big picture of church expenses this is probably not too much, considering that the value of investing in your church's growth is actually really important! BUT...read on....
HOWEVER: My wife and I have seen how valuable NCD can be to help churches grow, so we do not wish to prevent any church from taking part due to a lack of finance. We have allocated some personal funding towards this and so can offer a means-tested approach. If churches are working in deprived areas with little reserves, we will offer the whole thing for free. If churches are in wealthier areas, and have reasonable reserves, we would ask that you try to cover the whole cost. Those in between, we can have a discussion about what level might be appropriate, between £1 and £349, on the understanding that we would sooner have you benefitting from taking part than have your money.
