Church Vitality

Among the most desirable adjectives we'd like to use to describe our congregational worship and singing is vital, meaning full of energy and life, vigorous, animated. To determine if our worship and singing are vital, we might measure things such as volume, tempo, expressiveness, responsiveness of the people, level of the people's engagement, a sense of understanding of the text, and other characteristics.

Vital is also used to describe churches; and church vitality is something to be sought after, measured, analyzed, and reported. The United Methodist Church has embarked on a study of church vitality, funded by a half-million dollar grant from the Connectional Table. The study will be conducted by an independent agency using surveys, interviews and the Internet. After interviewing all bishops, all district superintendents, and selected church pastors and laity, the agency has identified six indicators of church vitality:

• Average worship attendance as a percentage of membership;
• Total membership;
• Number of children, youth, and young adults attending as percentage of membership;
• Number of professions of faith as percentage of attendance and membership;
• Actual giving per attendee; and
• Finance benevolence giving beyond the local church as a percentage of the church budget.

The agency will go on to study the statistics submitted by 33,850 local United Methodist churches, and those churches will then be divided into high-, medium-, and low-vitality categories. Twenty-five to thirty-percent of the churches in each category will be chosen randomly to determine factors that drive their levels of vitality. The agency hopes to identify structures, policies, and practices that encourage vitality, and then encourage their adoption and use throughout the denomination. The agency will report its findings to the Connectional Table and the Council of Bishops. (For more information, see "Call to Action seeks to increase church vitality.")

Questions to Consider:

• What characteristics would you use in determining the vitality of your congregation's worship and singing?
• Would you describe your own congregation's worship and singing as vital, or something else?
• Using the six church vitality indicators used in this study of the denomination, is your church one of high, medium, or low church vitality?