Church Health Track
The consultation process
Phase 1: Church Health Assessment
The first step toward a Church Health Consultation is a site visit to your church by your consulting team to assess the church's needs and potential, and to serve as a basis for proposing possible next steps for strengthening church health.
To prepare for this visit, your church will conduct the Natural Church Development survey and complete a brief (3- to 4-page) self-study that can be completed in a few hours. These materials need to be returned to Living Stones about two weeks prior to the Assessment Visit.
The assessment visit is usually a one-day visit by a two-person consulting team. The team will meet with church staff members and perhaps other key ministry leaders, mostly to listen and gather information. They will then meet with your Leadership Team–staff, governing board members, and key ministry leaders–for two to three hours to present your NCD scores, to give a preliminary assessment of the most important challenges facing the church, and to outline what would be involved in a full Church Health Consultation. This Leadership Team meeting can take place on a weeknight, a Saturday morning, or a Sunday afternoon. If it is important to you that the consulting team experience your Sunday worship services during the Assessment Visit, you should schedule a Saturday/Sunday Assessment Visit.
Following the assessment visit, your consulting team will send you brief written recommendations. If they believe that Living Stones could help you achieve your church health goals, your written recommendations will include a proposal for the next steps of the consultation process, a time frame for completing them, and cost figures. You can then determine if you wish to continue to the next level of the Church Health Consultation process.
When you schedule a Church Health Assessment, neither you nor Living Stones is committing to working beyond the Assessment Visit.
Phase 2: Church Health Consultation
A Church Health Consultation is a process covering about 14 months that includes:
- An extensive month-long self-study
- The Natural Church Development survey with detailed analysis.
- A 3- to 5-day launch site visit by your consulting team, typically a strategic planning visit, an all-church retreat, a leadership retreat, or some combination of these depending on your needs. The purpose of this visit is to develop and launch a strategic plan for improving the church's health over the coming year.
- 12 months of ministry coaching by a member of your consulting team, including unlimited phone and email access to your coach by your church staff and Church Health Team.
- An in-depth written report and recommendations which you will receive within 6 weeks of your launch site visit.
- A second Natural Church Development survey about a year after your first survey to monitor your progress in improving church health and to identify where focused attention is required for the coming year.
- Usually at least two additional coaching visits by your Church Health Coach, the first typically 4 to 5 months after the launch site visit; the other about 11 months after the launch visit. The length and agenda of these visits will be tailored to your specific needs. If your church is within easy commute distance for your coach, it may be more valuable for you to have more frequent, shorter coaching visits.
- Finally, if you are interested in continuing the coaching relationship, we will prepare for you a written proposal for another year's church health coaching. This will include a specific program of site visits, training events, and telephone/email coaching that is determined by your Minimum Factor and your church health coach's personal knowledge of areas that need to be addressed during the coming year. We contract for coaching on a year-by-year basis, tailoring each year's program to the specific needs of each congregation.
Optional: Fast-track Church Health Consultation
Our standard approach–an Assessment Visit followed by a Church Health Consultation a few months later–permits both the church and the consulting team to thoroughly assess the promise of a working relationship before entering into a major commitment. If, however, your situation calls for an expedited process to deal with an urgent need, we can combine the assessment and launch into a single site visit