The Readiness Indicator

How ready is your congregation to adapt to the world we find ourselves in now? How can you assess your adaptive capacity as a congregation?

The Readiness Indicator in Farming Church: Cultivating Adaptive Change in Congregations, is designed to help. Seven Key areas of congregational life are assessed, leading to an overall score along with seven sub-scores. Though we are not able to share the entire inventory with you, below are 10 sample questions from the inventory’s 49. We share these in the hope that you might use them with your leadership to initiate conversation about adaptive change. We believe the greatest need of congregations in North America (besides genuine faith connection with God) is increased adaptive capacity. Without it, most congregations will decline and eventually cease to exist. With greater adaptive capacity, congregations will follow the Holy Spirit’s lead, transforming into viable, nimble, missionally-congruent, vibrant faith communities. So, you are invited to engage these sample questions below, initiating discussions that matter among your clergy, staff, and lay leaders.

Rate each question on a scale from 0-10.
0 = low, negative, or completely false
10 = high, positive, or completely true

1. We are eager to discover new ways to live out our faith in this changing world
2. We expect our leaders to make organizational changes which make us more organizationally effective
3. We are motivated by love for God and people more than by our institutional concerns
4. Our congregation’s vision challenges us to become more Christ-like than we currently are
5. We give each other the benefit of the doubt when initiating change or challenging our norms and traditions
6. We regularly engage one another in faith-oriented conversations
7. Sometimes our leaders challenge us to the point of discomfort
8. We have resolved issues from our past which would otherwise hold us back from living out our calling
9. We are willing to lay aside our personal preferences about church for the sake of our mission
10. We can count on one another to proactively resolve concerns when they arise

"May we use every resource available to grow into God's hopes and dreams for us as Christ-centered congregations."