Pastor’s Manna
Survey Says…
This Spring a consultant helped us with a congregational survey concerning various aspects of worship. You responded to questions about the space we worship in, how we worship, the sermons, and the music we hear during worship. Our consultant met with Session in June and your session members are reviewing what was shareduntil we meet on July 13th.
Over the next few months we will be sharing with you specifics about the findings, as well as gettingpeople together to talk about the results and what, if anything, we might want to address. More about this will be in next month’s newsletter.
In the meantime, I wanted to share with you the general results. These can be summarized that while in essence, our members and attenders are content with how things are, there are some opportunities to tweak various aspects of how we seek to glorify God.
We saw over half of our average number of attenders complete the survey which is a great sampling of the congregation. The majority of those who filled out the survey attend weekly (71.25%) and 90% attend at least monthly. Just under half of those who took the survey have been members for over 15 years, and 33.75% have been members for less than 3 years.
Concerning the physical environment we found that while most things seem to be going ok, our sound system is not performing as well as we would like. This needs to be addressed.
Concerning the sermons, we saw very positive responses that sermons were meaningful and helped contribute to understanding, of appropriate length, and easy to follow (this was the lowest positive, 78% agreed, and 22% were neutral).
The prayers and sacrament questions also had positive responses with the least positive statement being “Individual prayer time is sufficient” (82% positive, 7.59% neutral, and 6.33% disagreed).
The largest variety in answers was in the Music and Worship areas. Most respondents appreciated the various forms of music that we utilize to worship God. The instrumental music and choral music all were appreciated. Traditional music had a positive response from 92% of the survey takers, and contemporary music was appreciated by 73%. Most interesting is that 78% believe that a blended format is valued in how we worship, with some contemporary songs, and some traditional offerings.
As I said, in the coming weeks you will have an opportunity to discuss this survey, in the meantime if anyone would like to see the raw survey results, the office has copies available for you to have.
In Him,
Pastor Jon
