Congregational Development

Program and Budget

The Vision for Congregations: Healthy Communities that Grow in Faith, Numbers, and Resources for Mission

• Natural Church Development
• Education for Development

In the last several years, the Congregational Development Commission has carefully considered how to invest the resources entrusted to it in order to achieve the best result for our congregations. In 2007, in line with the Bishop’s mission statement for the diocese, the Congregational Development Commission began investing new money—and, more important, new energy—in several initiatives designed to help us GROW.

As the Commission began discussing and working on these initiatives, we realized that the Commission itself needed to be reshaped. In 2008, the Commission was organized into the following subgroups:

• College Work, whose purpose is to encourage the sharing of resources between/among college ministries in parishes, including program ideas, understanding of the spirituality of college students, and shared mission work;
• Evangelism, Welcome, and Retention, whose purpose is to foster diocesan evangelism, new-member-ministry, and assimilation efforts, including support for the work of the Diocesan Communications Committee in the development of diocesan advertising programs;
• Growth and Development, whose purpose is to articulate and support a diocesan vision of congregational health and vitality grounded in spiritual formation, collaboration, and Natural Church Development;
• NCD Diocese of Ohio Implementation Team, the purpose of which is to support and encourage the use of Natural Church Development as our primary congregational development tool;
• New Initiatives, whose purpose is to propose, initiate, and support new church plants and/or restart work, where plans for new starts and restarts use alternative models for congregational development—beyond the “one-priest-one altar” model most familiar in our church.

The largest part of our budget (49%) is still allocated to support of existing congregations—but with one primary difference: the bulk of our resources allocated in this category now supports congregations where we hope for redevelopment and encourage a renewal of mission energy. We are also providing assistance to shared ministries in this category, as we encourage collaboration between and among parishes who are sharing resources, clergy, and (most important) ministry together. Every congregation who is finding it difficult to support a clergyperson on its current NDBI (net disposable budgeted income) should consider shared ministry, if they think they have the slightest chance of collaborating with other churches in their regions. At present, 12 of our congregations are engaged formally in shared ministries.

In the 2009 Congregational Development budget you will see that, working with the Finance Officer, we have identified a new source of Special Funds that permits us to continue our successful Comprehensive Parish Revitalization Program (CPRP) beyond the three-year pilot with All Saints in Parma. The CPRP makes educational and financial resources available to congregations with an average Sunday attendance between 70 and 90, and with a Normal Operating Income of less than $200,000. The Congregational Development Commission will announce the selection process for a new CPRP parish early in 2009.

Natural Church Development

Natural Church Development--our most extensive Congregational Development initiative, which we expect to be using in the diocese for many years to come—is now in use in 36 parishes throughout the diocese. We have trained over fifty coaches, and we expect that the program will expand naturally into many more of our parishes that wish to use a tested and flexible process that combines congregational-health assessment, planning, and implementation. We are in the process of training seven second-level coach trainers, so that we can offer our own coach training throughout the diocese on a schedule more convenient for many throughout the diocese.

Natural Church Development has worked with over 50,000 congregations worldwide, assessing congregational life against the benchmarks of eight “quality characteristics” found in all healthy and growing churches. These are:

• Empowering leadership
• Inspiring worship services
• Loving relationships
• Need-oriented evangelism
• Holistic small groups
• Passionate spirituality
• Gift-oriented ministry
• Effective structures

The assessment can be easily understood by saying that all congregations have leadership, worship services, relationships, and so on—the nouns—but assessing the value and effectiveness of those is done by investigating the degree to which the adjectives describe the congregation. This assessment is done by surveying the congregation, and focusing the results into a work plan that addresses the quality characteristic that least describes the congregation. The congregation then works on improving that quality characteristic. The congregation’s strengths—also revealed in the assessment—are then used in the improvement process. Some of our initial pilot congregations have taken their second NCD survey—and are reporting both significant progress in addressing the minimum factors AND increases in attendance. The second-survey results indicate that creativity and intentionality pay off in participation and enthusiasm for inviting new members.

Natural Church Development has discovered that working on the “minimum factor” improves performance on all the quality characteristics. According to the statistics collected in the Natural Church Development database, congregations that commit their time and energy to working with this program find that their rate of growth has increased by 51% in 30 months’ time. To our Congregational Development Commission, that statistic alone made an investment in NCD worthwhile. An additional NCD benefit is that we are building capacity by training and working with coaches in the diocese. Our hope is that these coaches will become the nucleus of a group of regional Congregational Development specialists, who will be trained and educated in several other important ways for work with congregations—in parish growth and evangelism strategies, diversity training, in asset mapping, in Healthy Congregations work, and in conflict intervention and management, to name a few. The direct expenditure earmarked for NCD in the 2009 budget is 5%, which supports the cost of coach training; this number may increase in the out years, as we add the other training pieces.

About 9% of our budget is allocated for Mission Enhancement Grants. These grants stimulate and support parish creativity and collaboration across the diocese. They give up to $5000 in seed money for new ministries and programs in congregations that do not receive other forms of diocesan assistance. Last year, we made grants to congregations that wanted to augment their music programs, to hire gifted and energetic folks to restructure their youth programs, to offer educational and spiritual development programs to their congregations and neighborhoods, and to develop new and attractive advertising programs for their parishes—to name a few. An important change in 2009 is the Commission’s decision to earmark half of the Mission Enhancement Grant funds for collaborative projects between two or more of our parishes.

Education for Development

This category represents about 11 % of the total budget; this year’s allocation is an incremental increase. Under this one heading now comes all our efforts to educate: Shared Ministry Conversations, the Diocesan Winter Convocation (which will combine the offerings in the Mission and Ministry Conference and the Bishop’s College for Parish Leadership), occasional educational days for different purposes, and individual continuing-education efforts undertaken by members of the laity. In 2008, as in preceding years, we supported efforts by parishes to learn about church growth, to advertise their parishes better, to offer faith-development and inspiration opportunities to their communities, as well as a number of educational opportunities for individuals to learn about Christian education for adults and young people, and to develop individual ministry skills.

The Diocesan Winter Convocation, to be held at the Holiday Inn French Quarter in Perrysburg on February 5 and 6, 2010. Our hope is that the breadth of offerings will encourage parishes to bring teams of people to benefit from different topics.