Understanding the demographics and health of your congregation is essential in leadership. Before you launch new initiatives or shift ministry strategies, you should define the audience you are reaching each week. Without this information, you may waste a great deal of energy, effort and resources spinning your wheels to make a greater impact.

One of the best ways to get feedback on your reach — and your church’s health — is to survey your congregation. At 7 City Church, we survey our congregation every 18 to 24 months, using SurveyMonkey to administer and gather survey data electronically. (Utilizing an electronic tool allows us to sort the data efficiently and glean more insights.)

There are five reasons to survey your church. 

1. Identify Your Audience
As leaders, it’s easy to assume we know our audience. Unfortunately, the facts don’t always back up those assumptions. A good survey will help you pinpoint with great specificity who sits in your services every weekend.

To help identify your audience, ask questions about age, gender, marital status, ethnicity, age of kids, zip code of residence, education level and career field. This data will give you a clearer picture of who attends your church.

When we conducted our last survey, we discovered that 40 percent of our adults are between the ages of 18 and 29, and 66 percent have a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education. This information has a direct impact on my communication style and ministry approach. 

2. Evaluate Outreach Effectiveness
A good survey will help you evaluate whether you’re reaching people far from God. For example, we asked our congregation, “In the last 12 months, how many times have you invited somebody to 7 City Church who does not attend church anywhere else?”

Too often, church leaders wake up one day and wonder how they ended up where they are. 

This question helped us determine whether people were comfortable inviting unchurched friends to our services.

The real test of our outreach effectiveness was this question: “Prior to attending 7 City Church, which statement best described you?” Options included: “I had not attended any church regularly for 6 months”; “12 months”; “2+ years”; “never”; or “I attended another church.”

We discovered that 36 percent of our congregation had been out of church for six months or longer prior to attending 7 City. Questions like this will help you accurately prove or disprove your long-held assumptions about reaching people.

3. Gauge Spiritual Health
We all want to make a spiritual impact, but sometimes it’s difficult to know how we’re doing. Some of the questions you can ask to uncover spiritual momentum include:

•  Since attending, I have (check all that apply): committed my life to Christ; been baptized in water, started reading my Bible regularly; started praying regularly; grown in my relationship with God; started considering Christianity and the claims of Christ

•  Which next steps have you taken in the last 12 months (check all that apply): attended a guest lunch; attended a newcomer’s class; joined a small group; started volunteering at church; volunteered with a community service project

•  Which statement best describes your current spiritual life: new follower of Christ; fully surrendered to Christ; spiritually growing; spiritually stalled; spiritually declining; I’m not a follower of Christ

•  What is your greatest spiritual need or challenge right now? (open-ended question)

•  How many times per year do you volunteer with a ministry or non-profit in our city? 

4. Assess Communication Strategies
We like to evaluate our internal communication and external marketing strategies during a survey.

We’ll ask attendees what their preferred communication method is (email, text, phone, etc.); which social media platforms they use most frequently; and how they heard about our church. These insights help us hone our internal communication methods and direct marketing money to the most effective strategies. 

5. Monitor Trends
By administering a survey every 18 to 24 months, you’ll be able to monitor trends in multiple areas. Too often, church leaders wake up one day and wonder how they ended up where they are. They ask, “When did we stop reaching children?” or, “Why doesn’t anyone attend our groups or classes any longer?” or, “Why are we only reaching Christians?”

Conducting a survey every couple of years will help you monitor trends, movement, growth and decline. This makes it easier to address areas of concern before they reach a crisis level.

The primary purpose of a survey is to clarify, evaluate and inform. We never survey people to ask whether they think our church should start a new program. Surveys are not a form of voting on ministry direction. However, we do ask questions that help us make better ministry decisions.

For example, a couple of years ago, we needed to change our Sunday morning service times to get our attendance to balance between each service (the attendance was lopsided at 66 percent vs. 33 percent). In our survey, we didn’t need to ask people, “Do you think we should change our service times?” We already knew the answer to that question. Instead, our staff came up with three different Sunday morning schedules; then we asked people to tell us which service they would attend in each schedule. The responses to the survey gave us the information we needed to launch a new Sunday morning schedule that resulted in a 45 percent and 55 percent attendance spread (and some Sundays it is almost 50/50).

Once your survey is complete, sort the data based on how various groups responded, such as age groups, singles, married people, those who have been attending for less than 12 months, new believers, established believers, etc. Important ministry insights will naturally emerge as you analyze the figures.