When interim pastor and church consultant Lavern "Bud" Brown was leading Mountain Vista Bible Church in Mesa, Arizona, through a time of transition, he decided it was the best time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the congregation.
As an experienced church consultant, Brown is familiar with a number of church assessment tools, but this time, in his work with Mountain Vista, he decided to give the Transformational Church Assessment Tool (TCAT) a try after looking for a tool that gave him clearer insight into the congregation than that afforded by other assessment options.
It takes a skilled pastor and it takes a willing church to turn a church around and move out of the swamp.
When Brown led Mountain Vista through TCAT, the church was searching for a new pastor and hoping for a refreshing change.
"It takes a skilled pastor and it takes a willing church to turn a church around and move out of the swamp and into conversion growth," Brown said. "I was able to infer some willingness to change from some of the scores [on the TCAT] when I correlated that with some of the things I was hearing in the personal interviews I was having with church members."
Mountain Vista was facing a significant amount of debt and other related challenges when Brown was invited to consult. Not wanting to interfere with his consulting work, Brown reluctantly agreed when the church asked him to become their intentional interim pastor.
After interviewing a number of church members and reviewing some of the church documents, Brown used TCAT as a way to objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of the church members. The assessment enabled him and his team to verify the information already gathered and catch any areas of improvement they may have missed. He found that the objective nature of the TCAT assessment reinforced the findings of the interviews and the document review. It forced the church's leaders and the congregation to take a sober if uncomfortable look in the mirror.
Having gifted professional musicians enables the church to produce effective worship services. The TCAT results reflected the strength of the worship experience and the engagement of the congregation.
However, immediately upon receiving the results from the TCAT, Brown realized that much of what the church said they valued was not reflected in the way the church functioned.
There was a slow boil development of a desire for change and a desire to challenge the status quo.
Brown said the congregation reported that small groups are very important and that the church leadership is personally involved in the lives of the congregation. This was interesting to Brown as he disagreed with the congregation based on his observation.
"I slightly disagreed with the congregation on these two points because those are values that were not visible in the life of the church," Brown continued, "I was able to say, 'This is a value that you claim you hold, but when we look at what's happening in small groups, this isn't really where we're at.'"
Over the course of the next year, Brown and his colleagues were about to help Mountain Vista establish a new vision for their discipleship ministry and do the work of recruiting and training new small group leaders.
Taking TCAT, Brown says, helped the church gain a sense of urgency and seek ways in which they could improve their ministry.
"There was a slow boil development of a desire for change and a desire to challenge the status quo," Brown said. "The TCAT helped precipitate action and made it much easier to implement changes needed to prepare the church for growth under its next settled pastor."
More information about the TCAT can be found online at tcat.lifeway.com.
This post was written by Chris Martin, Social Media Facilitator at LifeWay Christian Resources. For the original article, visit edstetzer.com.
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