5 Church Health Surveys
The attention on Church Growth has gradually moved from one-dimensional numerical growth to church health; a good and healthy development itself. Elder John Huang of Rutgers shared with me about a decade ago on quantifying a spiritual quality—I suppose it was because our common roots as physicists. It may not be easy and I don’t know any methods so far to measure spirituality for it is a complicated quality. Church health, likewise, is compounded, deserving breaking down of different issues before we can quantify them.
Before the Philippians Tests the Lord gave me a message on “The profiles of a healthy church”—from the Epistle to the Philippians, of course. In all the churches Paul served and epistles he wrote this church revealed to be a relatively healthy model. The search and research for church health theories are still in a budding stage; there are many different leading thoughts and books published. The Philippians tests, based on the epistle to the Philippians have no intention to endorse or contradict any tests and theories but just want to be one of the contributors toward the gradual understanding of church health.
Philippians Tests are developed over a period of time; first, as messages in a conference, then as Sunday Sermons, and in pastoral discussions and eventually in the form of 20-question survey on 10 subjects, which appeared to be important in the Philippians Church. The pilot tests were taken in IFCBC by general congregation first; the data were then analyses and compared with pastoral instincts. We chose to involve the whole congregation for this would eliminate the extremes and singular data points. The answers in most surveys proved to be normal distribution with standard errors within statistical norms. In one of the tests, the questionnaires were given to the leaders of the church, “as sample points,” and the answers were compared to that by the general congregation; they showed no essential differences; the margin of errors, of course cannot be established accurately with lesser information.
For this reason, we suggest that the whole church will take the tests together, rather than by a distribution of leaders who are familiar with the church operations. This set of surveys, not only will serve as a shared resource of IBS, free of charge to all users, but IBS also solicit the returns, for two reasons: 1) there are compounded information beyond the single questions; for which we have a further analysis to be provided to you when you provide us with your raw data. 2) as a future resource to share , the more the churches provide data to us, the better we may have comprehended the general condition of church health issues; for instance, we may know “The health condition of North American Chinese churches on evangelism.”
Now, let me present the first test—The Philippians Church Health Survey:
