NCD Church Survey

The NCD Church Survey scores a church against these eight Quality Characteristics, thereby identifying the most important one of the eight to work on next. Click here to download a 21 page introduction.

The Church Survey

About 25 years ago, Christian Schwarz and Christoph Schalk, to Christian leaders in what was then West Germany, surveyed 1,000 churches across the globe and found that there are eight characteristics that differentiate healthy growing churches from those plateaued or in decline. Many think of the NCD paradigm as the Survey, but now it is much more than that. The Church Survey remains one of the core pillars of the NCD resources, and has been used well over 100,000 times in the ensuing decades. About 3,500 Surveys of these Surveys have been conducted in Canada, but churches in 45 denominations! In order to receive a Profile, that is, the set of reports detaining the Survey’s findings, about 30 church members fill in a detailed questionnaire. The NCD Church Survey is accessible online in English only. Paper copies of the Survey are available in dozens of languages and NCD Canada has experience working in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian and Spanish.

NCD International

For all the detail on how and why NCD came about, visit NCD International.

How to proceed with the Survey

You will need a minimum of 30 people to provide responses to the Survey. Once all the responses have been gathered, the

Click here to download a brief set of instructions for conducting the Survey, and here for brief guidelines on how to use the online processing system for the production of the reports.

The NCD Cycle is a change management process to walk a congregation through the process of gathering its data, understanding the underlying issues or barriers to health, developing a plan of action to address the issues, executing the plan, experiencing the change