One of the most influential findings from REVEAL is its discovery of five best practices for churches—specifically, best practices for developing disciples of Jesus Christ. This was a discovery the REVEAL Team intentionally pursued. After we developed the Spiritual Vitality Index (SVI), we were able to identify the top 5% of churches in our database and find out what they were doing to be so effective at discipleship.

Practice #1: Get People Moving

People going to Best Practice churches feel like they’re on a spiritual “moving sidewalk”— there’s always a clear path and a next step to pursue in their spiritual journeys. Instead of an abundance of ministry opportunities and church activities, there is a prescribed path, which is exactly what people need, especially when they first come and experience church. For example, in most of our top churches newcomers are encouraged to go to classes to hear (ideally from the senior pastor) about the vision and history of the church, then they’re encouraged to figure out their spiritual gifts, and challenged to connect to the church through serving and small groups.

Practice #2: Embed the Bible in Everything

Best Practice churches embed the Bible in their culture. They make it easy for people to access a meaningful reflection on Scripture everyday with emails and texts to take away the excuses. They often connect these devotionals to the weekend teaching, so their message has a chance to take root. Some connect their teaching themes all the way through—from weekend services, to small groups, even to the children’s ministries, at least for a couple months in the ministry season.

Practice #3: Create Ownership

Best Practice churches tend to have highly effective small group systems. In addition, the culture of these churches empowers people to go out and make a difference in the world. They inspire their people to believe that they don’t just go to church. They believe they are the church. Top churches blur the dividing lines between pastors and congregants by assigning high levels of ministry accountability to lay leaders.

Practice #4: Pastor the Local Community

To pastor the community means being invested in solving the biggest problems in your community—coming to the table prepared to work with other churches and with non-profits and local government to do something about those issues. We see this kind of commitment in Best Practice churches in their decisions about how to spend resources and how to direct their church leaders and congregants. Best Practice churches set a high bar for serving in the church and in the community. These churches challenge their people to make community service a priority. They also make it easy for their people to find service opportunities that match their spiritual gifts.

Practice #5: Christ-Centered Leadership

It is not easy for church leaders to maintain a focus on making Christ the center of their lives in the very demanding, highly operational world of church leadership. Church work is 24/7. Best Practice church leaders shepherd their churches with a focus on growing hearts, more than growing numbers. For these churches, numbers are a by-product of an unrelenting focus on growing their people’s love of God and love of others.

Want to learn more about how your church is doing on the Best Practice Principles?

This work on best practices is some of the most important research we’ve done to help churches become more effective. About half of the report churches get when they take the survey is all about the best practices. It lets church leaders know how congregants are experiencing (or not experiencing) all five best practices so they know where to focus their energy. Learn more at www.revealforchurch.com

What’s New with the REVEAL for Church Survey?

In this episode, we discussed what we know about people who say they’ve stalled on their spiritual journey and how church leaders can help them get moving again.

Everyone Stalls

Every congregation has people who report being stalled in their spiritual growth. On average, 10% of the people in the 2,000 churches in the REVEAL database say that their spiritual growth has stalled. More than 90% of the 500,000 people we’ve surveyed say they stalled at some point in their spiritual journey

Characteristics of People Who Are Stalled

Three things tended to be true of people who are stalled:

• Characteristic #1—they are in the less spiritually mature stages on the Spiritual Continuum. About 50% of the people who have taken the REVEAL survey fall into the two least mature segments (Exploring Christ and Growing in Christ). However, these two stages are over-represented among people who are stalled, comprising 73% of stalled congregants. In total, 52% of stalled congregants fall into the Growing in Christ category.

• Characteristic #2—they invest very little time in personal spiritual practices. Even if we make the comparison apples-to-apples—comparing Growing in Christ people who are stalled to Growing in Christ people who are not stalled—the ones who are stalled engage less often in prayer, solitude and reflection on Scripture. For example, almost 40% of Growing in Christ people who are not stalled spend time daily in prayer, compared with 20% of those who are stalled.

• Characteristic #3: Stalled people participate less in church activities and are less satisfied with the church. Again, looking only through the lens of the Growing in Christ segment, those who are stalled participate less often in weekend services, small groups, and serving activities. Those who do participate report satisfaction levels that are 30 to 40% lower than those who are not stalled.

What Causes People to Stall

In the survey, we ask people to pick one of 19 reasons that best describes why they are stalled. The data suggest that there are three categories of reasons that most often cause people to stall.

1. Life circumstances such as a divorce, job loss, serious medical diagnosis, addiction, or mental health struggle has knocked them off their feet.

2. They’ve become too busy, letting other activities crowd their time and not prioritizing spending time with God in prayer and in His Word.

3. Something isn’t right in their connection with their church community. People who are stalled for this reason say that they are having a hard time forming deep relationships with others in their church, or that they’ve been hurt by other Christians and the pain has derailed their journey. Others say they need more help from their church leaders to keep moving forward in their faith.

How the Church Can Help Stalled People

When we asked people what most helped them move on from being stalled in the past, 42% said either re-engaging spiritual practices or engaging more with their church. Also, when we look at churches who have taken the survey twice, we see some evidence that stalled numbers decline when reflection on Scripture increases. When churches focus on helping people engage with their faith in some meaningful way in between Sundays, the result is a rising tide that lifts all boats.

In this episode, we addressed the very important role of the senior pastor in helping congregants grow spiritually.

Congregant Satisfaction with Their Senior Pastor Is Disproportionately High

For the 2000 churches that have taken the REVEAL survey, average satisfaction with the church’s role in spiritual growth is around 50%. However, average satisfaction with the senior pastor’s effectiveness is 70%—20 points higher—and that’s true for almost every church that’s taken the REVEAL survey, even when people aren’t happy with the church. We believe this discrepancy indicates several things:

• Congregants don’t view their church and senior pastor as one and the same. They are able to separate the leader from the church as a whole.

• People attach importance to the senior pastor role—not only as the primary teacher, but also the leader and visionary for church’s direction and ministry.

• It reveals how much goodwill and permission exists for the senior pastor that he or she can use to lead the congregation.

Expectations of the Senior Pastor

Based on our analysis of dozens of statements in our survey about the senior pastor, we found that people expect six things from senior pastors:

1) Pastoral Care—people expect the senior pastor to be the spiritual shepherd for people who are hurting from illness, grieving a loss or struggling with a big decision. This expectation shifts as a church grows, but the senior pastor is always the lead shepherd.

2) Spiritual Challenge—the senior pastor is expected to challenge congregants in their journey based on sound biblical doctrine and to model what a Christ-centered life looks like in the real world.

3) Serving Advocacy—whether the church needs volunteers to serve in the children’s ministry or the local food pantry, people expect the senior pastor to be a vocal and visible advocate for serving those in need and the church.

4) Preaching and Vision Casting—as the primary teacher at weekend services, the senior pastor is the church’s main source of spiritual education, inspiration and encouragement. The senior pastor is also responsible for casting a vision for the future that will capture people’s hearts.

5) Unity and Stability—people expect the senior pastor to make decisions that ensure the church remains financially strong and secure. The senior pastor is responsible for maintaining unity and holding church leaders accountable.

6) External Focus—the senior pastor is expected to be a cheerleader for the church’s engagement with community concerns like homelessness, social justice issues, and race relations.

What People Want from Their Senior Pastor

The jobs listed above are not equally important. Preaching and Vision Casting accounts for more than half of people’s satisfaction with their senior pastor’s effectiveness. Pastoral Care, Serving Advocacy and Unity/Stability combined account for less satisfaction than Preaching and Vision Casting alone. Having an External Focus has no impact on satisfaction. When we look at our data to determine what drives satisfaction with Preaching and Vision Casting, three statements surfaced to the top—and they were essentially the same for every segment along the Spiritual Continuum. This means people just getting started on their spiritual journey want the same three things from Preaching and Vision Casting as those in the most mature Christ-Centered group. They want a senior pastor to:

• Provide sound doctrine rooted in biblical accuracy

• Challenge them and provide next steps

• Model and reinforce how to grow spiritually

These are also the key characteristics for the senior pastor’s role of Spiritual Challenge. As a result, two of the senior pastor’s many “hats” (Spiritual Challenge and Preaching and Vision Casting) merge to form the biggest driver of satisfaction: Sound doctrine, challenge and modeling what spiritual growth looks like.

What People Need from Their Senior Pastor

We determined what people need by looking at which expectations drive growth from one segment on the spiritual continuum to the next. When we did this to assess the impact of the six senior pastor roles, we found that Spiritual Challenge has the most influence on spiritual growth. No other category comes close, even Preaching and Vision Casting. External Focus and Serving Advocacy ground in the more mature stages of growth, but Spiritual Challenge is still twice as influential.

These results might be taken to mean that senior pastors ought to focus most of their time and energy on creating blockbuster messages for weekend services. However, based on further analysis, that’s not true. There are two ways a senior pastor’s delivery of Spiritual Challenge impacts people’s satisfaction with the church: through teaching at weekend services and through leading—by creating a church culture where spiritual challenge flourishes. Spiritual Challenge through leading the church has four times as much impact on satisfaction with the church’s role in spiritual growth compared to teaching. Even the best sermon isn’t as important as do the day-to-day decisions a senior pastor makes in leading the church’s discipleship agenda. Therefore, based on our research, if a senior pastor has to choose between being a great teacher or a great leader, the choice is clear. Senior pastors should prioritize spending their time leading the church.

In this episode, we answer a question that haunts many church leaders—what do people really want from the church? And is what they want the same as what they need? At the heart of this question—want vs. need—is the idea that people don’t want much from the church; that all they want is something “light;” something that doesn’t shake the status quo. Thanks to our dataset of responses to the REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey, we know that what people want IS what they need.

Five Big Expectations People Bring to Church

Based on survey input from almost 2,000 churches and more than 500,000 congregants, we found that people expect five things from a church:

1) Spiritual Guidance—they expect a church to help them understand the Bible; to challenge them to develop a personal relationship with Christ and to give them next steps. They expect the church to be their spiritual guide, pointing them in the right direction and motivating them to move along that path.

2) Belonging—this means fitting in. People expect a church to be a place where they can worship and experience community in a setting that helps them feel like they belong.

3) Accountability—this means people expect the church to hold them accountable for making spiritual progress; to help them develop relationships with others who will help keep them on track.

4) Ownership—this is about identity and allegiance. People expect a church to be a place where they can be part of a bigger purpose--a place with a mission that inspires them and aligns with their values.

5) Serving—people expect serving to be central to a church’s core values. In fact, serving is probably the most widely recognized activity and tangible expression of the church beyond weekend and holiday services.

Two Things People Want from Their Church

We looked at which of the five things people expect from the church had the strong relationship with congregant satisfaction with the church’s role in helping them grow spiritually. In addition to their overall satisfaction, we ask congregants to rate their satisfaction with each of the five expectations of church life. Then we looked at the relationship between overall satisfaction and satisfaction with the expectations to determine what people want from the church. Two stand out as what people want the most:

1) Spiritual Guidance. When we look at the drivers of people’s satisfaction with the church, Spiritual Guidance leads the way. In fact, if you think of all the things that relate to satisfaction with the church as a big pie chart, Spiritual Guidance accounts for more than half of the pie (54%).

2) Belonging. A sense of fitting in and having community in the church is second at almost one-third (31%) of the pie.

Ownership and Accountability trail far behind…and Serving isn’t a factor at all in what people want from their church.

What People Need From Their Church

To determine what people need, we looked at the same five expectations that people have for the church and we determined which ones are most catalytic to growth across the three movements along the spiritual continuum. Our findings indicate that, not surprisingly, people need Spiritual Guidance. It’s the most influential category for all three spiritual growth movements. Belonging—a very important want—has a fraction of the impact on spiritual growth compared with Spiritual Guidance and every other expectation. Accountability, Ownership and Serving are much more influential to spiritual growth than Belonging.

Belonging is often what gets people in the game when it comes to attending church, which is why it’s such a strong driver of church satisfaction. But Belonging doesn’t become increasingly important as people grow spiritually, so its impact on spiritual growth is minimal.

Accountability jumps up as a significant factor in spiritual growth—increasingly so as people mature into the later stages of the Spiritual Continuum.

Based on the facts we’ve discovered in REVEAL, we advise pastors to focus their attention on the one thing people do want and need to grow into a disciple of Christ—and that’s Spiritual Guidance. We can break that down into the five statements that clustered together to form Spiritual Guidance (statistically, “clustered” is a technical term and an analytical process).

1) Helps me develop a personal relationship with Christ.

2) Challenges me to grow and take next steps.

3) Provides a clear pathway that helps guide my spiritual growth.

4) Church leaders model and consistently reinforce how to grow spiritually.

5) Helps me understand the Bible in depth. (Based on everything we know, this is the number one thing every church must do.)

If you use these five statements as a lens for all church decisions, people’s satisfaction will rise and they will grow spiritually.

In this episode, we talked about what we know about tithing based on REVEAL survey data from 2,000 churches and more than 500,000 congregants and what you can do to increase tithing in your church.

Key Tithing Statistics

In the REVEAL dataset, approximately 40% of congregants say they tithe, meaning they give 10% or more of their monthly income to the church. Many pastors have said that number seems high. Statistics from other surveys may differ from REVEAL based on who they survey (Christians in general, not church attenders) or how they survey (smaller samples). Also, it might be the case that some people are “rounding up” or including all of their giving, not just what they give to the church.

Tithing percentages do vary widely across our database. In the bottom 10% of the REVEAL database, 22% of congregants report that they tithe (no difference based on church size). In the top 10%, 57-60% of congregants say they tithe (higher percentage in churches of 250 or fewer adults).

What Factors Relate to Tithing?

• Income and education are somewhat related to tithing. Congregants with higher incomes and more education are more likely to tithe.

• Age also relates to tithing, with older congregants having higher tithing rates.

• Congregants who are in the more mature segments of the spiritual continuum are more likely to tithe. Just 12% in Exploring Christ vs. 58% in Christ-Centered.

• Satisfaction with your church’s role in your spiritual growth does not correlate with differences in tithing. Neither does being satisfied with your senior pastor’s effectiveness.

• Belief in Authority of the Bible: the level of tithing in a church correlates with the percentage of congregants who say they “very strongly agree” that the Bible has direct authority over what they say and do.

• Serving, specifically serving the church, correlates with tithing. We think this is because people become engaged in the mission of the church in a physical way when they serve. It’s an investment of time and energy that tends to turn into a financial investment in the church. People who tithe are also much more likely to say that they know and use their spiritual gifts.

Strategies to Increase Tithing

• Make congregants aware. Don’t tiptoe around the tithing conversation. This connects to belief in the authority of Scripture. Preach it!

• Make them capable/competent. Budgeting curricula are effective and inspirational.

• Make it easy. On-line giving can keep people on track, even during the dry summer months when giving tends to decline.

• Double down on the Best Practice Principles of Create Ownership and Embed the Bible, based on the finding that authority of the Bible and serving/being invested in the church predicts tithing. In churches that took the survey twice, changes in belief in authority of the Bible are correlated with changes in tithing.

• Also, although satisfaction with the senior pastor’s effectiveness does not predict tithing, one aspect of the senior pastor’s leadership does relate to tithing: modeling how to grow spiritually. Share your own struggles/victories/convictions around giving.

Finally, remember that tithing is fruit. It tends to reflect the spiritual maturity of a congregation. If you’re pursuing the best steps to help your people grow in their relationship with Christ, tithing is likely to be a natural by-product.

In this episode, we talked about some of the key words and concepts that you need to know to understand REVEAL’s findings and the content we will share on the podcast in the weeks to come.

The Spiritual Vitality Index

The Spiritual Vitality Index (SVI) was formulated in response to requests from pastors for a single number to “net out” the results of their REVEAL survey report. The average for the SVI is 70, like a grade of C. It consists of three parts: Personal Spiritual Practices, Faith in Action, and Church’s Role in Congregant Spiritual Growth.

The Spiritual Continuum

The spiritual continuum consists of four categories along the road of spiritual maturity: Exploring Christ, Growing in Christ, Close to Christ, and Christ-Centered. About 10% of respondents to the survey fall into Exploring Christ—some are seekers, some have been coming to church for decades. Growing in Christ is 40%, making this group the largest voice in most churches. They tend to be very dependent on church activities. Close to Christ (25% of respondents) represents people moving into a stage of owning their faith and doing more things on their own to grow in their faith. The Christ-Centered stage (25% of respondents) is marked by an attitude of surrender—being willing to risk everything important in my life for the sake of Jesus Christ.

Spiritual Growth Catalysts

Catalysts in science are things that help chemical reactions happen more quickly. Spiritual growth catalyst are the things that help people move forward along the spiritual continuum. For each movement, the key catalysts are:

• From Exploring Christ to Growing in Christ: core Christian beliefs

• From Growing in Christ to Close to Christ: personal spiritual practices

• From Close to Christ to Christ-Centered: faith-in-action

The Best Practice Principles

The Best Practice Principles were discovered after interviewing the highest scoring churches (top 5%) on the SVI. There are five BPPs:

1. Get People Moving: building a “moving sidewalk” so that everyone knows what their next step to keep growing in Christ-likeness.

2. Embed the Bible in Everything: making the Bible central to everything that happens at the church, from meetings to small groups to one-on-one conversations.

3. Create Ownership: congregants don’t go to church—they are the church, embracing the mission of the church and living in community with each other.

4. Pastor the Community: making the church externally focused, serving the community to the point that the church has a reputation in the community for their service beyond the church walls.

5. Christ-centered Leadership: the pastor is laser-focused on helping people grow in their relationship with Christ.

For more on the SVI, Spiritual Continuum, Catalysts, and Best Practice Principles, see the book MOVE: What 1,000 Churches Reveal About Spiritual Growth.

Archetypes

Archetypes are one of the most recent findings from the REVEAL dataset. They bring together the Best Practice Principles and the spiritual growth catalysts. There are eight archetypes, which are patterns or personality types that represent similarities between churches.

The archetypes are: Troubled, Complacent, Introverted, Extroverted, Average, Energized, Self-Motivated, and Vibrant.

The purpose of the archetypes is to help churches use their REVEAL results to understand what the best next step is for their church to move toward greater vibrancy. More to come on all eight archetypes in future podcasts, or see the book RISE: Bold Strategies to Transform Your Church.

Today's podcast is all about the history of REVEAL—a story about a survey born in 2004 that’s become the gold standard for measuring spiritual growth for churches across the country. More than 2000 churches with 500,000 congregants have taken the REVEAL survey. Beyond size, our database is very diverse, including a broad range of church denominations, locations, sizes, and styles.

REVEAL’s Origin Story: 2004-2008

In 2004, Willow Creek Church in South Barrington, IL, wanted to measure spiritual growth. Spiritual growth was defined using the Great Commandment as a guide, measuring the factors that increase a person’s love of God and love of others grow. Cally Parkinson was Communications Director for WCC at the time and headed up the survey effort, eventually authoring two books on findings from REVEAL.

• Three key “inventors”: Bill Hybels + Eric Arnson + Greg Hawkins.

• The question wasn’t “what drives spiritual growth?” Because we knew the answer—church activities.

•The only question was which church activity was most effective at spiritual growth. Was it small groups? Or midweek services?

• The surprising answer—neither one. In fact, we found that participation in church activities does not drive long–term spiritual growth.

• Instead, we discovered that the most significant catalysts that drive spiritual growth are personal spiritual practices, specifically Bible engagement. The things we do outside of the organized church setting are the most powerful influences on growing our relationship with Jesus—and consequently, our love of God and love of others.

The real breakthrough for REVEAL came two years later through the Willow Creek Association. The WCA is best known for its annual Global Leadership Summit, which this year will host 400,000 people in 128 countries around the world. Bill decided to share the survey insights at a gathering of WCA Summit pastors. Many of the pastors begged WCA president Jim Mellado to take the survey in their churches.

We started with seven churches…then 25…then in 2007, 500 churches took the survey. REVEAL the book and brand were launched, leading to changes at Willow Creek and many other churches. For the first time, we had data that churches could use to see how their people were doing in their spiritual growth.

REVEAL Best Practice Principles: 2008-2012

In 2008, studying the results from all of the churches that had taken the survey led to the discovery of the Best Practice Principles.

• The first (and only) REVEAL conference was held to discuss the findings and allow others to hear from the churches we identified as being exceptional in their implementation of the Principles.

•Nancy Scammacca Lewis joined the REVEAL team soon after as lead statistician.

•We built a database of church survey results, mined it for new insights, and published

MOVE: What 1,000 Churches Reveal about Spiritual Growth.

REVEAL Archetypes: 2013-Present

In 2013, a philanthropist with a technology company bought the REVEAL brand and intellectual property. Thanks to this investment, we rebooted the survey to be more user-friendly and published a second book Rise: Bold Strategies to Transform Your Church.

In Rise, we describe our findings about eight types of churches—we call them “archetypes.” The eight archetypes emerged out of the richness of data we have on the two key findings we described earlier:

• Where congregants are the catalysts of spiritual growth

• How churches are doing on the Best Practice Principles.

Our goal with the archetypes isn’t to put churches in boxes—it’s to give them practical next steps to make their church more vibrant. Looking across everything we’ve done and everything we know now about churches and spiritual growth, a pastor’s key takeaway from REVEAL should be that there’s hope—in fact, a lot of hope—because any church can RISE.

We’ve launched this podcast to share fresh insights from our rich data on how churches can help their people grow. We want to take the guesswork out of church-work for you!

Next time on the REVEAL Church Leadership Podcast: Key concepts you need to know to understand the REVEAL findings.