“Big” Mean Healthy and Growing?

Seminary Room N335

This study explores the issue of church health as measured by the Natural Church Development survey and the numerical growth of local churches based on church size. There have been 9,154 survey profile sets from various denominations in the United States generated between 2008 and 2016. Each church profile is based on 30 surveys from one local church and provides health assessment for the church in eight areas: (1) Empowering leadership, (2) Gift-based ministry, (3) Passionate spirituality, (4) Effective structures, (5) Inspiring worship service, (6) Holistic small groups, (7) Need-oriented evangelism, and (8) Loving relationships. Each set has demographic information about the church including church membership and church attendance for the last five years prior to completing of the survey. The data thus allow for calculating annual growth rate for correlation tests and also provides the ability to look for other possible factors that are associated with growth or non-growth, health or non-health of the churches. Since 793 sets come from Seventh-day Adventist churches, the study will offer a comparison between the Seventh-day Adventist churches and other Christian churches to see how and to what degree the size of the church matters for the health of the church and its numerical growth.