Cycle Starter Plans

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Having understood your church a little better with the help of the NCD Church Survey, its now time to start cycling together towards a healthier church. You’ve chosen to start experimenting and learning more about the topic to the left. Now, select one of the cycle starter plans below and write number 1 in its box. Put this sheet on your wall, then, go do it!

Next time you are meeting with others who are also working through a topic, ask each other the questions from the cycle, starting at “do” and finishing at “plan”. After a cycle you may decide the most important thing to do now is to keep going with the same plan, modify it, or choose another option from below. If choosing another from below, just write 2 in its box and so on.

If you’d like more cycle starter options, or to work on another topic highlighted by your NCD Church Survey results, just visit ncdchurchsurvey.org/cycle-starters

Q56

  • Ask the senior leader of your church to explain why attending the worship service is important. Discuss the answer with your friends and family. Provide the leader with feedback.
  • Consider the various components in your worship service and look for a specific regular part that might be seen as boring or an interruption to the flow of the service. Look into ways that it might be shortened, modified, or done more fruitfully at a different time or place.
  • Consider whether leaders and other contributors to your church's worship services would be bored by your contribution to the worship service (whether you worship from the platform or the pews).
  • Create a survey for your congregation to discover the top 20 most inspiring worship songs, hymns or pieces of music. For a time during worship services, invite respondants to share why a piece of music inspires them and then feature it.
  • Help your congregation understand that inspiring worship services depend upon every person bringing along their unique gift-based offering of worship to bless God and encourage the church. Help individuals to discover what their offering might be and how it could be expressed regularly before, during, or after the formal part of the service.
  • If each of your individual worship service components always seem to go for about the same length of time each week, consider what is "magical" about that length of time and why it might not be even more fruitful if each one was shorter or longer.
  • Think about parts of your life that you (and God might) find boring or unchallenging. Consider what kind of challenge you would need to undertake that would require you to rely more on God and work together more as a team.
  • Write down three reasons why you go to the worship service. Invite someone else to do the same and compare notes.