Church Plant Health Check

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About the Author -

Tony Thompson leads Hope Church in Luton, which he planted. He has been involved in church plant leadership for many years, in leading church plants and coaching and training church planters.

This Article

Monday, 7 June, 2010 - 20:39 Download PDF

Once you have launched your Sunday meeting it is easy to just get overwhelmed by all that needs to be done. Every now and again it is helpful to sit back and review how things are going and where adjustments need to be made. This health check is a tool to help you do this. It can be done by the church planter alone, with the planter and their coach or with the church plant leadership team. What you are looking for are the 2 or 3 areas that need to be given special attention at this stage in the church plant. These are identified by giving each area a mark out of ten and then identifying the areas with the lowest scores.

1 Leaders being developed.

• Who do you have as potential leaders?


• What are their capacities? What can they do now?


• Do others recognise their potential?


• What is best way to develop them? One on one, as a team?


• Do you have people who have been leaders in other settings?


• How are they settling in? Are they receiving your leadership?


• Are they fighting for position? Are they at peace?

2 Community being formed.

• To what extent do you have “true family”? What are the relationships like other than with you?


• What arrangements are in place for pastoral care? How effective are they?


• Who are the people with deep seated and long term problems? How are they being cared for? Are they damaging community?


• Who are the negative people? To what extent are they damaging community

3 New people being gathered.

• How many visitors are you getting to your main meeting each month?


• What draws them? How effective is your publicity, your personal invitations etc.


• Do they return? If not, try to find out why.


• N.B. important to know where to put focus – getting visitors or keeping them!

4 Vision being cast.

• How often are you sharing the vision?


• How has the vision changed?


• How many others can effectively share the vision? Are they sharing it?

5 Main meeting.

• How effective is it at retaining visitors? See 3 above.


• Review use of gifts of the spirit – regularity, breadth, depth.


• What do you feel about the balance between word and spirit in your meetings?


• How do you feel about the length of the meetings?


• Look at each part of the meeting – are you clear what you want to achieve from it, is it delivering?

6 Long term planning

• Are you clear where you want the church to be in 1 year, 3 years, 10 years?


• What are the implications for now?

7 Ministries.

• What new ministries have emerged?


• Are they achieving what they are meant to? Which are becoming a distraction and need to stop?


• Are there other ministries that need to be started?

8 Relationship with other churches.

• How have you been received by other local churches?


• Is the amount of time you are investing in these relationships appropriate? Should you increase or decrease the amount of time?


• Are you receiving much transfer growth? How is this being handled? What impact is this having on relationships?

9 Finances.

• What are the income trends? Is income growing in line with numerical growth?


• What is the relationship between income and expenditure?


• What would you like to do if you could afford it?


• Is the current way that you are investing your resources effective in achieving your goals? Do you need to make any changes?


• In what ways is “mammon” impacting the church? What should you do about it?