Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2009

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Russell Burrill

Second Advisor

Joseph Kidder

Third Advisor

Donald C. James

Abstract

The Problem

Natural Church Development (NCD) is a church health paradigm that is being used in Seventh-day Adventist churches across the United States as a tool for increasing both church health and growth. One question that needs to be addressed is whether the implementation of NCD within Seventh-day Adventist churches results in church growth.

The Purpose

The purpose of this dissertation is to establish a validation of the NCD process by evaluating the church growth experienced at the Milwaukee Central Seventh-day Adventist Church and compare that growth with Seventh-day Adventist churches across the United States which have participated in taking the NCD survey.

The Method

An exegetical study of Mark 4:26-29, along with a review of current literature, provides the setting to analyze the effectiveness of NCD within Seventh-day Adventist Churches in the United States. One hundred churches were randomly selected to participate in the analysis, and divided into two groups, depending on whether it could be verified that the church attempted to improve their minimum factor. The two groups church growth factors of tithe, local giving, membership, and baptisms were then compared.

Conclusions

As Christ spoke of the self-growing seed, so in Seventh-day Adventist churches across the United States, once the environment of the church is healthy, God will and does cause His church to grow. In comparing the growth statistics, there was a statistically significant difference between the two groups in four of the six areas tested. Those areas were tithe, membership, annual number of baptisms, and total number of baptisms.

Subject Area

Church growth--Seventh-day Adventists; Milwaukee Central Seventh-day Adventist Church (Milwaukee, Wis.); Natural Church Development (NCD)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/553

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