Greg L. Hawkins - Move: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth

T hey wrecked my day.

Three colleagues I trust and respect had just walked me through the findings of an elaborateand quite expensivecongregational survey, and the results werent at all what Id expected.

Ive always believed the local church is the hope of the world. I still do. But what I learned from the survey on that day was that the local church Id led for more than thirty years was not doing as well as I thought when it came to helping people grow spiritually.

Greg Hawkins, our executive pastor, and Cally Parkinson, our director of communications, had been working on the surveya project that had my full support and interest. They recruited Eric Arnson, a research specialist who helped them develop and interpret the survey. Their goal was to find out which of the many activities and programs we offer delivered the greatest spiritual growth in our people. In other words, we wanted to identify which activities were most effective in helping people grow in their love of God and love of others (Matthew 22:37 40). The results of our survey would help fine tune our various ministries so that even more people could grow deeper in their faith.

What they discovered challenged some of our core assumptions about our effectiveness as a church. For example, 18 percent of our congregationmore than 1,000 peoplehad stalled spiritually and didnt know what to do about it. Many were considering leaving. And some of our most mature and fired-up Christians wanted to go deeper in their faith and be challenged more but felt as if our church wasnt helping them get to the next level.

I was shocked. I had thought that helping people become fully devoted followers of Christ was what we were all about at Willow, but the facts told us we could do better.

After the team finished sharing the results of the survey, I thanked them and then told them I needed some time to process all their data and analysis. For the next several days I couldnt stop thinking about all I had learned. I reassured myself with the findings that 50 percent of our congregation indicated they loved God more than anything else and were expressing that love by reaching out to their unchurched friends and serving the poor on a regular basis. But the disconnect between what we thought we were doing and what we were actually accomplishing was troubling and unacceptable.

We made the survey the focus of our annual strategic planning event that year, and like me, many on our leadership team found the results disturbing. I shared with them some of my own misgivings when I first saw the results of the survey, but I reminded them of something I had learned a long time ago: facts are our friends. One of the worst things we can do as leaders is to ignore news that we dont like to hear. To their credit, the leadership team kept at it with open minds and hearts as they sought ways to improve the way we do ministry at Willow.

Heres one simple yet profound fix that came from this survey. We learned that the most effective strategy for moving people forward in their journey of faith is biblical engagement. Not just getting people into the Bible when theyre in churchwhich we do quite wellbut helping them engage the Bible on their own outside of church. We also completely restructured our Wednesday night service into a university format to better serve the varying needs of our people.

The changes we have made based on what we learned from this survey have made our church better. In recent years, we have baptized record numbers of people. We are healthier and more vibrant, and we are leading more people to faith. Most important, we are seeing more people growing into fully devoted followers of Christ.

As we saw how much the results of the survey changed the way we approach ministry, we decided to roll it out to a wider audience because we suspected that the issues we found werent just Willow issuesother churches would likely benefit from it as well. Working closely with their colleagues at the Willow Creek Association, Greg and Callys team expanded this survey to include 1,000 churches and over 250,000 congregants over a four-year period. This expanded database confirmed the findings from our own survey at Willow, and the result is