Video Transcript: Lesson 5 Assessments: Checking Vital Signs

Hello, welcome to lecture number five. Today we're talking about assessments,  checking vital signs. We'll talk a little bit obviously about what all that means. But I do want to challenge you to pay close as extra close attention to this lecture.  As we talk about assessments, because this is going to be a tool that you use  throughout all these upcoming lectures, this is going to be something you're  going to want to do and get going on. Because so much of what we're gonna  build upon is predicated upon this lecture and some of the challenges I'm going  to ask you to do so pay close attention. So let's go back from to our last lecture,  this idea of, we go to a doctor, again, we're not feeling well, we've got a cough,  we've got fever, we got achy muscles, and all that kind of stuff. What's the first  thing that happens? When you go to a doctor's office, you're not feeling? Well,  you go in? Well, even before the doctor comes in to talk to you, does anything  like my kind of visits is, the first thing they do is they get your vital signs, though,  the nurse will often be the one who comes in and she'll or he will take blood  pressure, temperature, they'll take my pulse. Sometimes, depending on what  brings you in, they might ask for some blood work. You might have to do a heart  check like an EKG, you might have some kind of X ray or scan done, you know,  previous your appointment, because they, they want to kind of see all the things  that are going on. This a doctor really wants to know when he gets down to talk  to you. What is going on here. So the doctor, the nurse, they work together to  gather as much information as possible. What what medical information can  they get about you, so that they have the most clear understanding, so they can  make the best, most accurate diagnosis for what is ailing you? So let's talk  about that in in terms of a church, right? How does the church get its vital signs  checked? You're getting You're the doctor, you're the nurse, you're trying to  figure out what's going on in your ministry. You don't have a blood pressure cuff,  you can't take the thermometer, and you know, put it somewhere we don't, we  don't have any x ray machines, we don't have any scans that we can do. Okay.  But we do have something, we do have some tools that will help us determine  the vital signs of the church. And those are called as assessments. And what is  an assessment assessment is this. It's basically it's a fancy word for survey,  okay. It's basically a survey that will turn people's thoughts and feelings, patterns of behavior into some kind of data that you can look at, to assess the situation.  So that's what an assessment is going to do. It's going to be a way that you can  take what's going on in your church and have it kind of in front of you that you  can see in some kind of form or fashion numerically or in stories or whatever, so  that you can see what is really going on. under the surface. What are the vital  signs how healthy is the church? So we've got a biblical precedent in a sense,  it's not about necessarily the the vital signs in a church, but we do have a  passage here from Nehemiah 2. And as a context of this is Nehemiah has come back from Babylon to the city of Jerusalem. And he sees that the wall is  destroyed, and how he goes about assessing the situation surveying it and 

figure out what he's going to do. So I'm going to read verses 11 through 18. It  says I went to Jerusalem, and after staying there three days I set out during the  night with a few men. I had not told anyone what my God had put in my heart to  do for Jerusalem. There were no mounts with me except the one I was riding on. So he's he's gonna ride around the perimeter of Jerusalem at night by himself to find out what's going on. Just by night, I went out through the valley gate  towards the jackal well, and the Dung Gate examining the walls of Jerusalem,  which had been broken down, and its gates which had been destroyed by fire,  then I moved on to the fountain gate and the kings pool, but there was not  enough room for my mount to get through. So I went up through the valley gate,  the officials did not know where I had gone or what I was doing, because as yet I had said nothing to the Jews or the priests or the nobles, or officials or any  others who would be doing the work. Then I said to them, you see the trouble  we are in Jerusalem lies in ruins in its gates had been burned with fire, come, let us rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, and we will no longer be in disgrace. I also  told them about the gracious hand of my God upon me, and what the king had  said to me, they replied, let's start rebuilding. So they began this good work.  Okay, so what we really have here is this story of Nehemiah going around, he  assesses the situation. Parts of the wall had been knocked down, some gates  were missing, parts had been burned. And he goes around, and he's just honest with him, he goes, you see the trouble or we're in? It's in ruins. The city is  undefended, we're not safe. He points out the problems and because this is an  and the people say yes, like, let's start rebuilding. I mean, Nehemiah did  nothing, but just kind of get an assessment. And that was enough to get people  to, to begin to say, Yeah, we need to, we need to do something here about this.  So we're going to kind of use that as a kind of a model or an example of what  we want to do. In our churches, we want to walk kind of the perimeter, the walls  of our church, the walls of our ministry and say, How are things really not just  what we want them to be or hope them to be? You know, we don't want to just  pretend the walls are fine. When they're crumbling and burned out and what  gates have been knocked down, we want to be honest, so that we can make a  difference we can. We can be more healthy, we can be stronger. Okay. But it  begins with getting a real honest understanding of where you're at. Now, for  churches, there's lots of different kinds of assessments that are out there that  you can do. Probably one of the biggest, if not the biggest, is one called natural  church development. It's referred to as NCD. It's a whole ministry. It's beyond  assessments. But it's a whole ministry by a gentleman named Christian  Schwarz, and it looks at Church Health, across eight different categories. And it  measures that it's a test you would administer to 30 people in your church. And I think it's, I don't know, 100. And some questions maybe, and they go through it,  and then they answer it. And then there's some really helpful data that helps you see where the church is at. There's also a bunch of them. And there's a slight 

cost to that. It's not a lot, but there is a slight cost. But there's also some online,  there's one a church health inventory, which is put on line by Thom Rainer, and  he is one of the foremost guys in church revitalization and Church Health. And  

he has one called Church Health inventory online. And when you go through  your reading, this week, I'll make sure that there's a link on there for you. It's a  free one, it's kind of like a down and dirty, you can get to it really quick, but it'll  help really kind of help you see where your church is at. There are also lots of  other ones. If you're just online and you do Church Health Survey or church,  whatever church assessment, there's going to be a bunch a lot of people have  come up with different ones over over time. And you can do that. Also, if you're  part of a denomination. A lot of denominations have their own resources. Some  will even like fund you to do like if something like NCD or reveal, which is from  Willow Creek. There's all different kinds of ones and some denominations have  their own assessments. The other thing is, you can just create your own. You  can make up your own. Hey, here's a survey. It can be online, you can just have  it on a piece of paper, and you can ask people you know, write stuff out. The  best way is probably numerically just to, you know, instead of yes, no or just  long paragraph answers, I guess you can include that in it, but really just on a  scale of one to five or one to 10. How do you feel about this? Or, you know,  whatever. So, what kinds of things are you looking for with doing an  assessment? Certainly, you want to get a sense of what are the spiritual  disciplines that your people are engaged in? How often did they pray? When did they pray? What did they pray about? Where do they struggle with praying? The things like they're reading the Word, how often do they read the word? Is it  effective? Do they read the Bible? Or is it some kind of daily devotion? What  other spiritual practices might they do? Do they? Do they tithe? You know, those sorts of things? We want to know about, you know, the presence of God to  people, how often do people have a sense of the manifest presence of God in  their life? Do they? Do they feel like God is actively involved in their life? Do they see God working? Do they, you know, see his fingerprints all over them or not?  Good question would be asking people about the number of spiritual  conversations they have with people who do not believe in the Lord. You know,  do you ever talk about Jesus to somebody who doesn't believe in him? Is it? Is it never is it once a month? Is it twice a month? Is it every week? Is it every day?  You know, where did they stand with that? And? And did they feel comfortable  with it? And why not? Why don't they feel comfortable? Or why do they? What  would make them feel comfortable? We can talk we can ask people about  serving how, how do they serve? Do they know what their spiritual gifts are?  What do they liked about serving? What do they not like about serving? Is there  an area that they're not serving? And they'd like to be? You know? Certainly,  we're gonna want to find out a little bit about worship. Is it a blessing to them?  Do they feel connected to God? Do they feel like it honors the Lord? Is it done 

Well? You know, just just obviously, a million things we could do for worship. We  also want to talk to get some information about community. How well you know,  do you relate to people? Do you feel you know, you can trust the people in the  congregation? How often? Do you meet with them outside? Do you do enjoy  them? Do you laugh with them? Do you play with them? We want to get a sense of missions? How invested are people in missions? Do they know who the  missionaries are? Do they care about it? Do they have a heart for the lost  around the world? Local ministry? How are people engaged in going through all  the needs that are present in your community? How are they involved in that?  What would they like to be involved in? effective leadership. You know, how well  do they feel are, do people feel equipped to lead, they feel empowered to lead?  Those sorts of things. So when you do an assessment, if you do something like  NCD, or Thom Rainer, or church inventory, or things like that, you're gonna get  kind of, they're gonna touch on all these things. And assessments are invaluable when you get kind of the numbers back. And they're invaluable, because they  force us to face facts. Like this is where we're really at. It's not what we want it to be. It's not what we think it should be, or what we pretended to be. It's what it  really is. And because I think that for a lot of people in your ministry, or your  church, that their perception of things may not be reality. And it may be the same for you too, because whoever we are, we're always confined to one point of  view. And I might be thinking things are going great, but the other 10 people in  the room think it's a mess, but I think it's okay, and we can talk ourselves into  like, you know what? It's fine. It's no big deal. It's a mean every you know, but  when you dealt with the hard facts of reality, it really gives you reason to just  take a step back and reevaluate and to, you know, really then be pushed  towards repentance and change and movement. Okay. So, just how you might  want to go about doing this. It's pretty simple. One, find an assessment, create  one. It can be as big or as short as you want, I mean, I wouldn't do like six  questions, because I don't think you're gonna get a whole lot out of it. But I also  don't think 423 questions is, is necessary either. Again, I would challenge you  just to look at stuff that's online, there's a bunch out there, use one of those use  NCD and then just get a general sense of kind of where, where you're at, okay?  Then obviously, you're going to ask people to fill it out. My only guidance for you  here would be really picking people who are involved, kind of more involved, you know, not the guy who shows up once every six months. I don't know how  helpful that would really be. But I would say people who are invested in the  ministry, and maybe a cross section, we want some younger people, some older people, some men, some women, some people have been here 20 years, some people have been here, you know, two years, you know, just kind of a cross  section. So you got to kind of get like a pretty fair, just kind of a pretty fair  representation. You know, so because if I ask, this one group of people who  always hangs out together, and they always talk together, how are we going to 

get the same answer for all, so we kind of want to get a little bit broader view. So ask people to fill it out. And then obviously, once they fill it out, and you get the  results, you're going to want to evaluate those results, you're gonna want to look for any patterns, and any trends to understand really what's going on. And then I think most importantly, is being ready to embrace reality, because I can just  about guarantee the results are not going to be good. You probably know that  already. I mean, if you're taking a class on revitalization, you're going to expect  the results of some kind of an assessment not to be very flattering. And the  biggest thing you're going to do in this whole process, is embracing it. And like  facts are our friends. And we just need to deal with it, we need to accept it.  Because you're the key in that if you do it, other people will, if you don't do it,  they won't either. So let's look at a godly example of someone who kind of  embraced reality, and then was able to help others do it, if you recall. Is this  story of? Well, we'll get there. We'll get there in a minute. I'm going to share a  story with you about Ezra but I want to get there in a minute. And I want to say  something else. First. I want to share my story of when we went through this. So we did NCD assessment. And we had 30 people in our church do it. And we  were going to have a big retreat on like, what are we going to do next, or we had a coach who was leading us through this process. And we took the assessment  like a month ahead of time. And the results were going to be shared with our  team, our revitalization team at the retreat. Well, about a week before the  retreat, the coach sent the assessment results to me. And they were horrible.  They were embarrassing. Of all the churches that take the NCD survey, which is you know, 10s of 1000s. We were in the bottom 15% in all eight categories that  you get all eight categories in the NCD survey, we were below average in all  eight. And my first response to this was I just wanted to reject it. I got inwardly I  was by myself in my office, I got really defensive about it. I had been the pastor  of the church for six years already. I felt terrible about the scores. And I felt like  they were kind of reflective of me and my leadership. And the first thing I tried to  do was to convince myself that the numbers were much lower than they actually were. I was like, Oh, I knew this guy. He's so negative. We shouldn't have given  him the assessment. This one, she's always crabby, we shouldn't have given it  to her and the numbers were artificially lower than it needed to be. Well, after a  couple of days, I accepted the numbers as facts. Okay. I just was like that's,  that's what they are. Just from an objective standpoint. I was like, This is what  people said, this is where we're at. This is the reality. And once I did that, like I  kind of embraced it. But I then started to get really nervous about sharing it with  the rest of our team was going to be that weekend. So you can guess what  happened when the results were then shared with the rest of our team? They  have the same response I did. They were, they were like defensive. And no, this  isn't really the way we we we're better than this. And this is, you know, these  numbers can't be trusted. And, you know, statistics, or can be skewed one way 

or another, and all that kind of stuff. And then Joe asked me to just be quiet for a while our coach, and not to say anything. And so after they had kind of talked  about this for a while, Joe said to me, he said, John, what why don't you share  with the group kind of what you think. And I shared that I knew how they felt that  that was my first response too and it was hurtful, it was embarrassing. I was I  didn't know if once they saw the results if I was gonna have a job. And I just felt  like, I just really embarrassed. And I also shared like that. I was so disappointed  that I led the church for six years and and I was so humbled like this is where we were at. And it was very humbling. Like I just, you can't brag when you're in the  bottom 15%. And so it's really humbling. And then what happened next was one  of the biggest things that has happened in the many years that we've been  trying to do revitalization was the team slowly began to rethink the survey  results. And with great humility and honesty, the Holy Spirit was, had to be at  work. And many of the team members admitted to the truth about the church.  And they spoke about the love that they had for the church. And just how broken they were about its current state and their desire to see it return to what it used  to be or what they dreamed it could still yet be. And they just did it dutifully.  There wasn't any blame. Everybody around the room shared a sense of  responsibility. And again, of all the things that happened over the following  years, I don't know if any of that could have happened without what happened in that room. And we just said, this is us. And it was only staring at the facts on  paper in front of us that got us to that point. We needed an assessment. It's kind of like, if we go back to the medical health analogy, you go to your doctor, and  you're having all these problems. And he says, Well, you should really do X, Y  and Z. And you say, Well, I don't need to do and he goes, Well, here's your  blood pressure, and here's your cholesterol, and here's your triglycerides, and,  you know, here's your blood sugar, and, you know, he goes through all these  things. And it's like, you can't argue with the numbers, right? You can't argue  with those. You can say, well, I'm doing okay. But as soon as you see them, like  kind of like the pretending is over. And that's what happened for us. We've been  kind of talking ourselves like, Hey, we're doing good, we're getting better, we're  on the right track. The reality was, we weren't, okay. So we just kind of this time  of like, we just like we're gonna embrace this, we're not going to run from it,  we're not going to defend it, we're not going to ignore it. We're going to embrace it right now. And I think really, that's so critical. Like, that's your role as leader.  The facts as unpleasant as they may be, are your friends. And this isn't about  assigning blame. It's about, you know, taking responsibility. You know, we  haven't baptized anyone in 12 years. You know, we haven't had a new member  in six years. You know, I mean, those are more like church tracking data. But I  mean, you know, the Church Health Assessments kind of things will say, right,  you know, we hardly have anybody who shares their faith, hardly anyone. Right? And it's like, okay. So anyway, what I wanted to just end with with you is really 

just a biblical example of, of a leader who was able to change and transform a  situation because he was humbly willing to embrace the reality of the situation.  And that's Ezra who's one of my just favorites. Certainly in the Old Testament,  one of my very favorites. And what was going on was the Jews who had come  

back from Babylon. They went right back to the very sin that they had  committed, that got them, you know, exiled in the first place. They were  intermarrying they were not being obedient to the Lord. And so, Ezra, he just,  he's just appalled he tears out his beard. He's just he's it says he's just  trembling. He's appalled at what what the people had done. Like they hadn't  learned their lesson, after 70 years of exile, they went right back to the same  thing. So here's this great man of God. And what does he do? He prays and  says that the evening sacrifice, I rose from myself a basement with my tunic and cloak, torn, and fell on my knees, with my hand spread out to the Lord my God,  and prayed, oh, my God, I am too ashamed and disgrace to lift my head to say  to my face to you, My God, because listen to this, our sins are higher than our  heads. And our guilt has reached to the heavens, from the days of our  forefathers, and to now our guilt has been great. Because of our sins, we and  our kings and our priests have been subjected to the sword in captivity, to pillage and humiliation at their foreign at the hands of foreign kings, as it is today.  Notice what Ezra did. He lumped himself in with the, with the sin and the  disobedience of the people of that day, but also of the path of the kings and  priests and he's like, God, we have sinned. You know, he, he makes himself one of them. Right? He he doesn't run from it. He doesn't accuse and say, Well, you  know, y'all are messed up. You know, he's like, we're all messed up and God,  you know, we need to be forgiven of this. And say, Well, what is the impact of  when a leader just humbly, you know, addresses the reality of the situation and  takes responsibility for it. And so beautiful, says in verse, chapter 10:1, while  Ezra was praying and confessing, weeping and throwing himself down before  the house of God, a large crowd of Israelites, men, women and children  gathered around him, they two wept bitterly. So what happened when Ezra did  this, other people joined him, up until then, nobody was like, admitting it,  confessing it, nobody wanted to do anything about it. But when they saw their  godly leader, humble himself, align himself with them, offer up repentance and  pray for renewal,then they joined in there with him, right. I mean, that's like just  the beautiful story of like the power of humble leadership, and how it can  transform a whole group of people. So my, my challenge to you is to get going  on doing some assessments, establish a baseline of, of where you're at, humbly embrace it, and help your people to do the same. And then you can really have  a place to work from. And, and you'll find that assessments, not just at the  beginning, but throughout the revitalization process, are very helpful. Just  recently, my church completed our fourth round of assessments with the NCD  survey. And so about, every year and a half to two years, we do it and then we 

track, how are we doing? Are we becoming more healthy? You know, like,  passionate worship and inspiring worship and, and passionate spirituality and  effective structures and, and gospel sharing and in relationships, and how are  we doing, and it really helps us to see where God is at work and where, where  we still need more, more help. So you're gonna find this to be just a fantastic  tool at the front end, but then, again, throughout the process, so please, please,  please get going on this. We're gonna refer to this a number of times throughout the lectures, and it's really going to give you a great place to get started. So let  me pray for you. Lord, I pray for a generation of men and women who will stand  in the shadow of Ezra, who will be that humble, gentle, Grace filled leader who  seeks nothing more Lord than to see you honored and glorified and is willing  Lord, to just lower themselves so that others Lord can seek truth and embrace it  as well. God help us with this very hard task. Not let us not cling to pride and  fear of what others might say about our leadership. But let us show our true  leadership Lord, by being faithful to the truth, we pray this in Your name, amen.