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missional community

Assessment of Missional Communities – Leader Self-Assessment

If the mantra “what you measure is what you value” is true, then we need to have a way to measure and assess the health and effectiveness of missional communities.  The series that follows will summarize how we assess missional communities at The Austin Stone.

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Leader Self-Assessment of Missional Community

The leader self-assessment was written to measure the values of the community.  We have four core values (Word, Prayer, Demonstrate, Declare), and the questions are getting to the heart of what the group truly values in their communal and missional life together.

You can find the assessment we have our leaders do in PDF form below:

MC Assessment Tool.pdf

In short, we are asking a series of quantitative and qualitative questions to gauge the overall health of the core values of a community, which provides us with a decent picture of how a leader sees their missional community.

The Heart Behind Assessment

To communicate assessment to our leaders, we always include the following:

There are two primary reasons that we want you to assess your group on an ongoing basis: so we can know how to better equip you to lead, and so that we can continue to strive together to more faithfully make disciples.

In the same way annual partnership renewal is an opportunity to both reflect on God’s grace in our lives to obey and to seek repentance for where we have fallen short, so too it is helpful to have a set of things to examine our own hearts and calling to lead.

Toward that end, this assessment is not a “checklist of righteousness”, but an opportunity to remind ourselves what God has called us to and how we can more fully depend on His grace to accomplish the vision he has given us. I pray that it is a tool that encourages you!

Additionally, we do our best to follow up personally after someone has completed an assessment to ensure they know we value their input.

What do we do with the data?

After you have completed assessments, it’s important that you actually do something with the data!  We track how groups change over time so we know where to focus our training for our leaders corporately.  You can see our data trends here.

As you’re considering assessments, what would you add?

By Todd Engstrom

Although I was raised in the church and had a knowledge of God, I didn’t embrace Jesus until I heard gospel preached and lived out by some Young Life leaders. God has proven faithful and good to me since that day, even in great suffering and loss. I have learned to treasure Romans 8:28 as a wellspring of hope and truth.

God has blessed me with an amazing wife (Olivia), three sons (Micah, Hudson and Owen) and a daughter (Emmaline). Growing up in the northwest, the thought never crossed my mind that I would have four children who are native Texans. Despite landing in the south, I still watch Notre Dame games with my children every Saturday in hopes they will land at my alma mater.

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