ORLANDO — Nearly 400 people from throughout the Florida Conference met at First United Methodist Church here Jan. 11 to learn what makes a church healthy and how their churches can begin the process of diagnosis and transformation.

The event was an introduction to Natural Church Development (NCD), a church health process developed by German theologian and researcher Christian Schwartz. It was sponsored by the Orlando District Healthy Churches Initiative. The Rev. David Wexler, a member of the staff at Willowcreek Community Church in Chicago and publisher of the NCD material in the United States, taught the event.

The Rev. Jeff Stiggins, superintendent of the Orlando District, said the event was a way to help churches that wanted to be involved in congregational transformation. “The conference talks about transformation, but transformation into what?” Stiggins said. “Natural Church Development gives us a picture we can grow into…and provides us with a clear path of how to become…that kind of church.”

Stiggins said NCD is not a “silver bullet” that will solve all of a church’s problems, but a long-term process that allows church members to work with God. “Natural Church Development recognizes what we can do and what only God can do,” he said. “We can set the sail, but only God can blow the boat.”

Wexler said God’s part in the process is called the “ ‘all by itself’ principle” and comes from Jesus’ teaching on the natural world, where things seemingly happen all by themselves. “If we could see what’s going on in the lilies of the field, if we could figure out how God wired the world, we’d see how the church is supposed to work,” he said.

Wexler said the first step in NCD is for a local congregation to do a survey “to find out where you’re healthy and where you’re not.” The survey is completed by the pastor and 30 members.

The survey is more accurate than an intuitive assessment of the church, Wexler said, adding 30 percent of a survey group of 2,000 pastors who first participated in NCD correctly named where their churches were not healthy.

The survey grades a church in each of eight quality characteristics—empowered leadership, gift-oriented ministry, passionate spirituality, functional structures, inspiring worship, holistic small groups, need-oriented evangelism and missions, and loving relationships. “The power is in the adjectives,” Wexler said. “Every church has worship, but is it inspiring?”

Once the congregation identifies its characteristic with the lowest score, what Wexler called the “minimum factor,” the congregation works to raise its health in that area. Wexler said the single-focus approach is key to success in working with NCD. “Work on one thing,” he said. “Focus on raising the one minimum characteristic. Even if you don’t do the survey, just focus on one thing. Do something.”

Churches should spend a year focusing on their minimum factor, then retake the survey to measure how they have grown and identify a new minimum factor.

Wexler said 85 percent of congregations that have gone through the survey and worked on improving at least one characteristic have seen “qualitative and quantitative results.” The other 15 percent either did not do anything to improve their health or were in the midst of a serious conflict that needed to be resolved first.