Vital Congregation

Overcoming Our Spiritual Challenges

  • We need more “turn-around” leaders.
  • We need to embrace metrics and goals as a means of accountability.
  • We need to build trust across the denomination.
  • We need to better connect with our neighbors and community members who have not been invited to church or who have not ever visited a church. Click here to see who these people are.

Congregational Vitality Research

The Council of Bishops and the denomination’s Connectional Table, in a commitment to be faithful to the heart of our denomination (the local church) empowered a team to identify what makes a congregation vital. In January 2010 the Call to Action Steering Team was formed to gather data and to seek an objective operational assessment of the Connection. The information gathered would lead to recommendations for the reordering of the life of the Church for greater effectiveness in making disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world. (CTA Report p. 6)

Reliable statistical findings based on massive amounts of data from over 32,000 congregations show that high-vitality churches consistently share common factors.

Visit the Call to Action site for more details

The 16 Ministries/Strategies of Highly Vital Congregations

The comprehensive study conducted by Towers Watson uncovered that high vital congregations shared at least 16 Ministries/Strategies that were termed “drivers of vitality.” They indicated that if churches worked on all 16 they would move toward vitality or become more vital. These 16 ministries/strategies can be grouped into four areas:

  • Small Groups, including ministries with children and youth
  • Lay Leadership
  • Clergy Leadership
  • Worship

View details on the 16 ministries/strategies of highly vital congregations.

How were the drivers of congregational vitality determined?

Working with the Call to Action Steering Team, Towers Watson used a combination of surveys, interviews, church visits, and analysis of available data to identify potential drivers and indicators of vitality. They used objective (non-opinion based) observable metrics to uncover indicators of vitality. In order for an indicator to be used they had to meet these criteria:

DESCRIPTIVE -the measures had to provide graphic illustrations of an aspect of church life, leadership, or processes that people recognize as important and understand.

DIFFERENTIATING -the measures used had to be more common in churches with high vitality than in churches with low vitality.

QUANTIFIABLE -the measures used had to be something that can be objectively measured, rather than subjectively assessed. Objective, quantifiable measures avoid the risk of biases that are likely when using subjective measures.

AVAILABLE -the measures must have available data for at least three to five years across the UMC North American churches. There were many metrics that otherwise could have been useful indications of vitality, but they were either based on information that was not collected on a consistent basis across the five jurisdictions or had not been collected over a long enough period to allow sufficient time to establish trends.

View the Call to Action Report