Congregational Vitality among Evangelical Churches in Canada

The Congregational Vitality Scale

In my view, the best work on church organizational vitality comes out of Australia, where around 400,000 attendees from 7000 churches and 22 denominations (the majority of Christian churches in Australia) have participated in the National Church Life Survey (NCLS). Churches are surveyed every five years, starting in 1991, so they can track changes in vitality over time. The NCLS surveys both attendees and leaders in each church (NCLS, 2012). Over fifteen years, the NCLS team has identified nine core qualities of vital churches, along with three attendance measures. The three attendance measures are young adult retention, number of newcomers, and net attendance change (people joining minus people leaving or deaths). The nine core qualities are as follows:

Internal Qualities

1. Faith – measured by attendees’ belief that their faith as grown, private devotional practices, and importance of God;

2. Worship – measures the vibrancy of worship and preaching in the congregation;

3. Belonging – attendees’ sense of belonging, including frequency of attendance at worship and other church activities;

Inspirational Qualities

4. Vision – “If there is one core quality that stands out as making a powerful difference in church vitality, it is the presence of a clear and compelling vision” (NCLS, 2006, 15). This includes commitment and confidence in the church’s vision and goals;

5. Leadership – inspiring and empowering leadership and moves people toward action. This includes perceptions of leaders and clear structures;

6. Innovation – the church is open to new ways and ideas, and leaders encourage innovation;

Outward Qualities

7. Service – involvement of affiliates in church-based and community-based service;

8. Faith sharing – this includes inviting people to church, evangelistic activities, and talking about your faith at home;

9. Inclusion – welcoming new people, open friendship circles, and following up on those who are drifting away. (Bellamy et al., 2006)

Seeking a balance between internal, leadership and external factors, I followed these nine core qualities in the creation of the congregational vitality scale, to the degree that our survey allowed. I also added a few items that were pertinent. The wording of the items that make up the scale is given below, along with how the items is measured.3 The resulting 20-item congregational vitality scale shows strong statistical qualities.4

Participation and Belonging

1. Everyone enthusiastically participates in congregational singing (SA–SD);

2. Percentage of regularly participating adults who participate in a small group once a month or more (recoded into quartiles);

3. Percentage of regularly participating men who volunteer in some capacity in this church (recoded into quartiles);

Vision and Leadership

4. The vast majority of lay people are not aware of the goals and direction of this church (SA–SD, reverse scored);

5. The lay leaders are committed to this church and fully endorse its mission (SA–SD);

6. The participants in this church are pessimistic about its future (SA–SD, reverse scored);

7. I am worried about the long-term future of this church (SA–SD, reverse scored);

8. Church priority? Encouraging people to serve according to their gifts (very high, somewhat high, not a priority);

9. I think we have problems with communication between the clergy, lay leaders, and the congregation (SA–SD, reverse scored);

Service

10. In general, this congregation is wary of change and innovation (SA–SD, reverse scored)

Innovation

11. Does this congregation have any organized effort, committee or designated individual whose purpose is to provide help to members or regular participants, for example, by cooking meals for a new mother or someone who just got home from the hospital, or providing financial assistance to someone who needs it? (yes, no);

12. Church priority? Serving the poor and needy in the community? (very high, somewhat high, not a priority);

Faith Sharing

13. Church priority? Maintaining an active evangelism and outreach program, encouraging members to share their faith? (very high, somewhat high, not a priority);

14. Attendees frequently invite unconverted friends and family to this church (SA–SD);

Inclusion

15. Does this congregation have any organized effort, committee or designated individual whose purpose is to follow up on newcomers and visitors? (yes, no);

16. Does this congregation have any organized effort, committee or designated individual whose purpose is to reconnect with those who used to attend this church but have not done so for a while? (yes, no);

17. Newcomers find it hard to form friendships with people in this church (SA–SD, reverse coded);

Growth – attendance and finances

18. Compared to two years ago, that is, this time in 2007, has the total average attendance increased, decreased, or remained about the same? (decrease, same, increase);

19. How would you describe your congregation’s financial health currently? Would you say it is “excellent,” “good,” “tight but manageable,” “in some difficulty,” or “in serious difficulty”?

Job satisfaction

20. On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is completely dissatisfied and 10 is completely satisfied, how would you rate your overall job satisfaction right now? (reduced to a 5-point scale).

The final two items, financial health and job satisfaction, are not included in NCLS core qualities. I added these because institutions require both adequate volunteers and finances for vitality; they are necessary but not sufficient for vitality. Healthy leaders are also necessary but not sufficient for a vital organization; thus I included the job satisfaction item. These items fit well with the rest of the scale.

A few qualifiers are in order before presenting the results. Recall that all the questions below were asked of the lead pastor. This is an important limitation, as laity were not surveyed. Second, the correlates of congregational vitality are partly a function of the questions used to measure vitality itself. For example, if a measure of congregational vitality includes measures of numerical (quantitative) growth instead of measures of (qualitative) growth in spiritual maturity, then numerically growing churches will appear more vital, and church qualities that correlate with numerical growth (such as number of baptisms, or evangelistic programs) will be more important predictors. I presented all the questions above that make up the scale so that the reader can draw his/her own conclusions about the validity of the vitality scale. Finally, statements made in this paper are generally about statistical findings, and are not intended to be interpreted as value judgments. For example, just because an item is (or is not) statistically correlated with the vitality scale does not mean it is endorsed (or discouraged) by the author. 

Footnotes:

(3) SA–SD refers to a five-point Likert scale: strongly agree, moderately agree, neutral, moderately disagree, strongly disagree. Quartiles divide percentages and other continuous measures into four groups, so that they better fit the scale.
(4) The scale varies from 27 to 70, with a fairly normal distribution. The Cronbach’s alpha for the scale is .782, which means the items are suitable for scale formation. It does not correlate with church size, urban/rural setting, ethnicity, gender, racial/ethnic makeup of congregation, or poverty/wealth, which could indicate a demographic bias to the scale. Other demographic correlates are easily explained, as I note below.