Your ChurchScan Results

Welcome to your personalized ChurchScan results. Please contact us with questions or inquiries about next steps for your church.

Submitted on: July 19, 2013 at 10:16 pm

Submitted by: patricia@wellspringcommunity.us

Also check your email at patricia@wellspringcommunity.us for a link to return to these results.

Corporate Pulse:

Your Church’s corporate pulse refers to those qualities normally found in healthy churches where Christ is present, honored, listened to, and followed. Passages like Acts 2:42-47 and 4:32-35 reveal the wonderful atmosphere God intended for your church (as a whole) to experience.

8
LOW PULSE
Churches that score low in Corporate Pulse face real danger. They often go through the motions of doing church, without the joy, momentum, and unity we see described in the book of Acts. They exhibit all the activities of the New Testament church, but lack it’s sense of blessing. The church sees few conversions and lacks a sense of awe at what God is doing in their midst. They likely reside on the downhill side of their life expectancy and may have experienced great pain/trauma. Something painful has usually happened in the church’s history to compromise the spirit which Christ intended the church to enjoy.

ACTION POINT:
A low score should be cross-referenced with a church’s score for Historical Crises. Those events often give insight into why the church continues to struggle to enjoy unity and fruitfulness. As you reflect on the pulse of your church, ask the Lord to help you discern what drives your church’s heartbeat and fuels your church’s ministries. Christ is our life (Col. 3:4). We need his life and resurrection Presence to fuel our ministries. Begin to seek Him about what might have negatively impacted the pulse of your church’s corporate heart.

Trust in Leadership:

Whether your church body trusts its leadership (or not) speaks volumes about the health of your church. Trust is the currency of leadership, the “coin” of God’s realm, and an absolute necessity for churches to function in a healthy way. Sometimes though, a congregation will not trust current leaders, or boards won’t trust pastors because of wounds received from other leaders in the past. The crux of this is that, if people do not trust their leaders, they will not follow them, so every leadership initiative gets resisted or openly opposed.

7
LOW TRUST
A general lack of trust for your leaders exists in your church. It likely evidences itself on multiple levels. Leaders experience undue suspicion, control or power-seeking, or imagined or magnified offenses over issues that appear strange. These symptoms show up no matter who holds leadership positions in your church. We believe the roots of distrust for leaders will trace back to damage caused by a leader or leaders who broke trust in some way. It could have been a moral issue or a power-play. Churches with low trust experience episodes of corporate anxiety or hostility, an attitude of “they are up to something,” and decreasing amounts of joy. Leaders who are not trusted often experience deteriorating physical, emotional, and spiritual health. The toll on their families is also high, sometimes alienating them from God and/or from participating in church life.

ACTION POINT:
Your church must review its history to identify the leadership failure(s) that broke the trust during the journey of your church. Once identified, these wounds must be treated using methods designed to heal the church as a whole. If hostility is too high, an objective outside consultant may be needed, someone who is experienced in helping a church regain trust for its leaders.

Mission/Vision Fulfillment:

How well are you fulfilling your church’s mission/vision—the reason why Christ put you where you are? This is a great indicator of either God’s blessing on your ministry or a red flag revealing His unhappiness with you. Do you as leaders know, pray about and pursue with commitment the mission/vision God has laid upon your hearts or on your founders’ hearts? Failure to do so can be a clear symptom of the fabric of your church starting to unravel. Churches that are sick tend to use their energy and resources to get better—i.e. focus on themselves and not on reaching out. Underlying issues can subvert your best, most creative efforts at fulfilling all that God has in mind for your congregation.

7
LOW FULFILLMENT
Jesus cares about mission/vision fulfillment. He told the church at Sardis, “I have not found your deeds complete in the sight of my God” (Rev. 3:2). If you score low in this area, the reasons can be three-fold: 1) You don’t have a clearly defined mission/vision; 2) Your leaders are too worn out dealing with pain and problems to expend the necessary energy to pursue the mission/vision right now; or 3) The congregation resists leadership initiatives so you can seem to get untracked. You may be suffering from any or all of these issues, and thus your “deeds are incomplete.” A lack of mission/vision fulfillment can cause high degrees of stress and discouragement if you as leaders keep trying to do the right things, yet cannot seem to get past the energy drain or congregational resistance.

ACTION POINT:
Many churches think that, if they have failed with one mission/vision, the answer is to create or redefine another one! Before embarking on a venture into identifying and implementing a new vision for your church, you must address the issues that have hindered leaders from achieving the mission/ vision you have. Ask God to reveal to you the real nature and reasons for the challenges you face (2 Sam. 21:1-3). The good news is that, if you really want to know, God can and will tell you. You must as leaders act to address these things first before God will help you achieve your mission/vision.

Communication:

Healthy communication is crucial to a healthy church, like the life-blood circulating in a body or nerve signals which permit all parts to operate as they should without paralysis or insensitivity. Moreover, in a healthy church, the head (leadership) listens to the body. On the other side, without an atmosphere characterized by open, truthful communication, conflicts seldom get resolved or reconciled and bad feelings build and go underground, fueling the engines of gossip and criticism. Unhealthy churches always have unhealthy and/or painful patterns of communication. These expressions and behaviors move back and forth from overt to covert, distorting how your church functions. In its worst expressions, “elephants” fill whatever room you are in and no one will talk about the things that desperately need to be addressed.

8
LOW COMMUNICATION
People do not feel free to discuss difficult topics in your church because they don’t feel safe doing so. Unresolved conflicts prevent grace-filled communication! A cycle of increasing isolation and alienation ensues, seriously damaging and limiting any loving culture your church may possess. Because unresolved issues linger and build, reactive behavior will exhibit itself in informal and even formal church meetings. People may tolerate this only because they have never known the church to be any different.

ACTION POINT:
Handle with care, as churches with low scores are often a minefield for leaders! Before you can restore open communication and resolve conflicts in a healthy way, you must return to the source of the bad communication, the event(s) which started this way of behaving. Then you must take responsibility and confess this bad behavior to Christ and one another. Serious reflection is needed to evaluate exactly how the church arrived at this place. If leadership feels that they might not be able to control the unhealthy or critical communication to find out these things, an outside, objective, facilitator can help lead your church through the healing process it needs.

Historical Crises:

Historical crises, and especially a pattern or cycle of unresolved trauma, represents the single most significant indicator of a need for healing in your church. These wounds seldom get addressed in churches because leaders are not trained to do it and seldom realize how churches carry such damage going forward. Your church may be in crisis now, but you may also know of crises it’s faced in the past. An unresolved crisis acts like a tear in the fabric of your church that, unmended, can further unravel with each new problem. If your church also scores low in the “Trust in Leadership” category, crises can result in splits, firings, petitions, or other highly unhealthy corporate behaviors.

5
MUCH EVIDENCE OF HISTORICAL CRISES
There is a high probability that your church has a painful past. The congregation may have experienced split(s), abuse of or by a church leader, sinful reactivity i.e. lashing out, shameful events i.e. racial prejudice or moral failure by a leader. All these, unrectified, have a long-term impact on your church body and its willingness to follow leadership. Your answers indicate that the wounds from these types of events in your church’s history have yet to be healed. They prevent you from gaining any kind of traction in fulfilling your mission.

ACTION POINT:
Seek the Lord for courage to face and repair the damage your church may have experienced. Ask Him to give you the courage to walk through a process of corporate healing. Such a process holds great hope for restoring your church to proper functioning.

35Total ChurchScan Score

INTERVENTION REQUIRED: Your church is likely experiencing, or, has experienced in the past, a high degree of congregational pain and you need to do something about it immediately to get your church healthy again.

General Assessment:
Churches that score in the 25-50 range are in need of corporate healing. Such churches manifest a variety of symptoms which often seem bewildering to the people who lead them. Symptoms can include irrational levels of resistance to change, anxiety about the future, distrust between lay and pastoral leaders and between leaders and congregation, all of which makes leading difficult if not impossible. Schisms can form around lightning-rod issues— worship, associate staff, the pastor. Offenses become magnified. Bad behavior often precedes splits or exoduses. Those who visit the church don’t stay long. Church members “acclimatize” to the environment and see all this as “normal.” Unaddressed, these painful symptoms usually increase in intensity and frequency.

Leaders and members often misdiagnose the true nature of their corporate problems and blame the pastor, staff member(s) or particular lay leaders. Leaders often attribute the problems to the inadequate policies or ineffective programs. Shepherds who minister in these contexts often feel like failures, and they blame themselves or others for the church’s stalemate. Their personal health often suffers, sometimes severely. They carry heavy burdens and, despite their best efforts to make progress, they keep slipping back. The pressures of leadership also bear down on the pastor’s spouse and children.

What we suggest:

We highly recommend you purchase copies of Healing the Heart of Your Church for your leaders to read. If the message of Dr. Quick’s book resonates with your leaders, you may take one of the following steps.
If you know your church needs healing and you are a transitional/interim pastor with facilitating skills, or have led the Healing the Heart of Your Church process in the past, consider purchasing The Healing the Heart of Your Church Facilitator’s Guide and Participant Workbooks. You can then begin to lead the church through the healing process in house.
If you recognize your church needs healing but feel that you need an outside, objective, trained facilitator, contact us about helping to heal your church.

Contact us.

Disclaimer:
Results are subject to the observations of the assessment survey taker and are not the official evaluation of Blessing Point Ministries, Inc. nor the opinion of any of it’s consultants. Results are intended to facilitate conversation about Church health and not be used as any form of official rating or criteria for making decisions.