16/08/2024
What is the Church Development Tool?
The Church Development Tool is a short, anonymous survey designed to help you get to know and understand your church community better. It’s available to any church on AChurchNearYou.com. To use it, ask your congregation to answer the survey questions, either online or offline. From these responses, you’ll get a simple report that gives you a clear picture of your demographics and how people see and live out their faith in your church.
We also provide accompanying surveys for children and young people, so that you can learn about their experiences of church too.
How can it help me?
The survey results help you to look at your community with fresh eyes and find opportunities for growth. This could be by building on your strengths or addressing gaps and areas you’d like to improve. We then match you with resources that will help you with your chosen area of focus.
In particular, the Church Development Tool can help you to look at:
how representative your church community is of the community you serve - the report you get will show you your congregation’s demographics in comparison to the census data for your parish
how your congregation are living out their faith and growing in discipleship
what opportunities for engaging with children and young people might look like in your parish
After you have used the tool there is a guide with tips and links to a range of resources to choose from, to help you act on what your survey results suggest. If you want, you can contact your diocesan staff for discipleship or parish support for help interpreting the results and choosing what to focus on.
How does it work?
To access the survey, log into AChurchNearYou.com as an editor, visit the Marketplace and you will see the button to enable The Church Development Tool survey.
After clicking View Survey and Responses you will find a range of ways to invite your community to respond:
a link to email people, to ask them to complete the survey online
a printable PDF poster with a QR code to the survey, to display for people to scan with a smartphone to respond online
a printable PDF of the survey, for people who prefer to respond on paper
accompanying surveys for children and young people
suggested text and slides to help you explain about the Church Development Tool to your worshipping community
Please note: People won't need to be an editor on AChurchNearYou.com to answer the Church Development Tool survey.
Where are the results?
Survey responses completed online are automatically counted within AChurchNearYou.com. For offline responses, someone at your church will just need to input results from any paper surveys into AChurchNearYou.com - anyone who is an editor for the church on AChurchNearYou.com can do this.
Once the responses are in, AChurchNearYou.com then generates a report for you with graphs, that you can view on screen, download as a PDF or print.
What can I do with the results?
Share and discuss them with your church
You could present the results to your church and ask them what they think of them. It could give people insights they didn’t have about your community and help you collectively think about what you might like to change or explore in the future. Alternatively, you could just share the results with your leadership team or PCC if you wish.
Use them to inform your strategy and practice
The responses will give you a picture of how people think about their faith and their place in your community. It will show you how your church demographics line up with the community outside of your church. You can use these insights to shape your strategy and practice. For example, thinking about particular demographics you’re keen to reach out to, or how you can boost engagement and enthusiasm for Bible study groups.
Explore new opportunities
Maybe the results will show gaps that you didn’t know were there. They might give you concrete evidence of something you had sensed in your community but couldn’t be sure of. Either way, you can use the survey as a way to keep growing as a community. Perhaps some people are not using giftings they would like to (e.g. music, youth work, or supporting digital evangelism), and perhaps these gifts could help in an area you’d like to explore more?
What’s new for 2024?
This year, there are two new changes to The Church Development Tool.
1. There is the ability to customise the Church Development Tool for your church by disabling certain optional questions from the online survey. You might want to do this if certain questions are not relevant or not a priority for you to survey.
2. Through your benefice site, you will have the choice to see the results of your different churches as individual reports or together in one benefice report.
If you are not already a registered approved editor on AChurchNearYou.com, sign up now so that you will be able to use the Church Development Tool.
The survey is now open for 2024 and will close at the end of the year.
If you used the Church Development Tool in previous years, you will be able to view your survey results from 2023 and 2022 through the Marketplace on AChurchNearYou.com. These can give you a helpful big picture of your church community over the years.
If you have any questions about the Church Development Tool, don’t hesitate to get in touch by raising a ticket with the Editor Help Desk.
- Alessi Burnham, Digital Officer
