Our Health Check Results

Over December 2014 we took our pulse.  We asked you to complete a quick ‘health check’ survey and let us know how you think our church is going. 

Here’s what you said…

You think that our church is good at Bible focused teaching (86% of you said so), preaching (81% of you think we are good at this) and Bible Study / Growth Groups (68% of you).    This is great news.  Ensuring the Gospel message is at the heart of all our proclamation and teaching is one of our core values.

It’s also fantastic news that 89% of you said that yes, you would bring a friend to church. This was reinforced in the comments.  For example, ‘solid, gospel focused teaching, ‘and, ‘a warm environment for a visitor,’ and ‘I’m proud of our church and want to encourage my friends to become Christians’. 

Having said that, we are falling well short of hitting our goal of doubling in size by the end of 2016.  (That would mean 1,100 people in attendance weekly.)  We need to investigate why we are happy to invite our friends, yet we are a long way from achieving growth targets.

One way we can possibly help is by holding special events to which we can invite people. 48% of you said it would be a good idea to hold events on depression and anxiety.  Well, watch this space – we are planning something on this for the near future.  Other popular suggestions for special event topics were on women, worry and busy life syndrome and more men’s events.

Overwhelmingly, the survey was full of positive comments about our church.  There was of course some constructive criticism – and we thank you for this – we need to hear it and want to continually improve.  There weren’t any key patterns in this – comments varied from looking at how we can become more involved with the local community to how we can make people feel more welcome and including music that is more Christ centred. 

Thank you to everyone who completed the survey.  Please be assured that your comments are taken seriously by the team. We want to stay focused on our vision of introducing Jesus, changing lives, by regularly reviewing all that we do, so expect some more brief surveys in the future.  

By Stella Brown, Communications Manager

How Are We Tracking? - Survey Results

Somebody once wisely said, “If you aim at nothing that’s exactly what you’ll hit.”

A year or so ago now our staff and parish council put together a number of goals for us to work towards over the next few years to keep us focussed on the main game.

We knew that we had 2 major priorities in line with our vision to “Introduce Jesus and Change Lives”- that of helping our members to grow in their faith and to reach out with the good news that Jesus is our rescuer. 

To that end we came up with some goals based around the results of the National Church Life Survey (NCLS) that we took part in back in 2011.

The good news is that we’ve been making some progress and we ought to give thanks to God for it.

One of the most encouraging areas is in the growth of the percentage of people who say that they have “experienced much growth through our church in the past 12 months.”  There has been a significant 9% increase over the NCLS back in 2011.  Furthermore 98% of all those surveyed said that they had grown spiritually in the past 12 months. Praise God!

We’ve also seen growth in the number of our members who are inviting people to church [4% increase] and growth in the numbers of those involved with some sort of ministry leadership [7-8% increase]. 

We have maintained our level of growth group membership and this is the only area of the survey where we haven’t moved forward. 

Another pleasing aspect is that of those who have joined us in the past 2 years 28% weren’t attending another church before they joined. Although we are happy to welcome people who are transferring from another church - maybe out of our area - the real kingdom growth is with those who are coming to church for the first time or after a long gap. There is much rejoicing in heaven over that!

In the past two and half years we have grown by 25% and now average 677 people in church each week. As to our finances we have now had a couple of months of reaching our budget and although we still have a shortfall to make up things are looking much better.

All in all this is all great cause for thanksgiving to God for answering our prayers and honouring our commitment to Him. We are getting on with our mission together.

Bruce Dingwall

Senior Minister