Proverbs 27:12 (NIV)
12 The prudent see danger and take refuge, but the simple keep going and suffer for it.
Improving the health of a church requires that leaders be prudent.
It is important that they see danger coming and take appropriate steps to avoid it, minimize it, or implement an action that employs the Growth Force of Energy Transformation and make that danger work towards achieving their goals. Leaders who do not see it coming – or turn a blind eye to the danger – may cause the whole church to suffer.
On the other hand if you want to make your church suffer there are a number of options available. Never put the church – or yourself – through the trauma of doing a Natural Church Development survey. Such action could have the undesirable effect of making key leaders aware of the danger they are facing and put them on high alert.
To avoid such humiliation – if some influential individual insists on completing a survey – it may be possible to have the completed forms lost by NZ Post. Many people do not like completing questionnaires and when they find all that work has gone astray in the post, they become a little bit irritable if asked to immediately do the same action all over again. There is no guarantee completed survey forms will be lost in the post; out of many hundreds of surveys posted, only two have been lost and in one of those cases NZ Post’s fine effort was frustrated by a diligent church secretary who copied all the completed questionnaires before sending them off!
You may be able to leave the fog in place in the church for a few more happy months by allowing members to take survey forms home to complete. Believe me, you will never see some of those questionnaires again; and others will be so late coming back the information will no longer be relevant.
Another way of circumventing the use of information generated by the Natural Church Development survey is to use a considerable amount of resources – leader’s time, energy, finance – in generating a comprehensive five-year strategic plan for the church before the questionnaires are completed. That way, the leaders will have made such an investment in the plan they will be extremely reluctant to change or abandon it no matter what the survey outcome reveals. It is almost guaranteed they will take no notice of any dangers ahead uncovered by the survey because of the church investment in the comprehensive and hopefully, complex, strategic plan.