Our church was started to reach people who are not a part of any church. We are constantly trying to evaluate how well we are doing in light of that vision. Last month we had a church-wide survey that had a ton of questions that helped us evaluate how well we are doing in a number of different areas. Here are some of the interesting things we found:
- Our attenders are 60% married & 40% single (that's adults & students responding)
- Our most common age brackets are 28-35 & 23-27
- Since we launched, 55% of new attenders have been from another church and 45% have come from an "unchurched" background. That is much better than the national average for churches and we have actually gotten better recently (it's 50/50 in the last year specifically)
- 71% of people came to CCC because they were invited
- Our Starting Point environment is extremely helpful for getting people connected in small groups (twice as likely to connect) and contributing on ministry teams (three times as likely to serve)
We also learned there are some things we can improve on:
- Communicating what Starting Point is and why it's valuable to newcomers and long-time attenders.
- We can communicate about membership more clearly and regularly
- We can improve on how well we track assimilation on an individual, and church-wide level
The survey was a bear to analyze but it provided a lot of great information, only a portion of which I mentioned here. It will probably be a yearly thing for us and should go a long way towards helping us constantly get better at everything we do.
Does your church do surveys? If so, could you send me a copy? If not, why not?
