For many years we could not offer this service without requiring customers to provide us with the needed data from their own church records. We now have the capacity and authorization to retrieve your church record data directly from the Lifeway national database to produce your customized Internal Church Growth Analysis.
What does an Internal Church Growth Analysis reveal?
Internal growth analysis reveals trends and changes. When you look at the previous ten years of your church's history, charted by age group and program, discoveries are made.
Positive trends are an invitation to study what is being done well, with the hope that principles or practices can be identified which will transfer to other areas of the church.
Similarly, negative trends alert leaders to determine if that trend is correctible. Sometimes an internal trend is simply reflecting a change in the local population. In that case you would gear your response toward the long-term, rather than expend energy on a situation that ultimately will not be reversed until the local population undergoes change.
Sudden changes require investigation. An abrupt decline is often traceable to the loss or removal of an especially effective person. It's important to understand why that person was so effective, as well as why that person is no longer there. Even without knowing the "why," one can reasonably assume that any event that produced such a sudden decline has likely provoked a crisis of broken trust for someone in the church, and it may be yet unresolved even years later.
The benefits of Internal Church Growth Analysis are obvious to new pastors and leaders of large churches. But possibly no one stands to gain more from these insights than pastors of churches that are in a position to break the 200 barrier in membership. During that transition time when growth is happening but adding more staff will have to wait, these studies can allow the overextended pastor to remain more intimate with the inside workings of his church.