Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Spiritual Life Survey | Begins March 13

In the movie “The Grinch That Stole Christmas”, there was an X-ray machine that could measure the size of the Grinch’s heart. The machine showed us his heart growing bigger. What if we had a way of seeing the size of our own hearts – a way of measuring how much we love God and love people? What if we had a way to understand which things we do together have the most positive impact on our spiritual growth?


Willow Creek has developed a survey that will help us understand Saint Matthew better. The REVEAL Spiritual Life Survey provides a vivid picture of the “unseen” hearts of our congregation an
d their spiritual growth. It utilizes state-of-the-art research to capture not just spiritual behaviors, but also attitudes, beliefs and felt-needs of churchgoers. The Spiritual Life Survey is a proven way to benchmark and track spiritual growth in a congregation. It moves beyond measures like attendance and financial giving to determine if a church is really making a difference in helping people become more like Christ.

The Spiritual Life Survey is an anonymous, congregational online survey that is easy to understand, simple to administer and repeatable over time to monitor change. We will take the survey at Saint Matthew from March 13 to 27. Late in April, we’ll receive a customized, comprehensive report in presentation form that benchmarks and analyzes Saint Matthew’s spiritual profile. No individual responses are revealed. We’ll see what’s going on as well as how our spiritual attitudes, practices and beliefs compare to the REVEAL survey database of over 500 churches and 150,000 congregants.

We will share the results of our survey and reflect and discuss together what we learn and how God is calling us to move forward. We look forward to this adventure together.

Watch the website and the online Good News for directions to do the survey. We will send emails out with directions, so make sure we have your current email address.
(You can update your contact info online at http://saintmatthew.org/About/directory.htm)