Kairos Intelligence

Knowing your community. Knowing the moment.

Congregational Maturity Assessment

The question an eldership brings to it: where are we actually strong, where are we quiet, and do the leadership and the members see it the same way?

The Kairos Congregational Maturity Model is a way for a congregation of the Churches of Christ to take an honest reading of where it stands, and to decide what to work on next. The elders answer for themselves, the members answer anonymously, and the assessment shows both readings side by side.

See it in three minutes

Seven areas, read separately

There is no overall score, and there will not be one

Each of the seven is read on its own. A congregation strong in benevolence and quiet in evangelism is not usefully described by one number — and averaging the two hides the very thing worth talking about. There is no composite, no grade, and no ranking against other congregations.

The moment a congregation has a single number, the conversation becomes about the number.

How a cycle runs

  1. The leadership answer first, and separately. Each elder works through the questions without seeing anyone else's answers. Only once everyone has finished does the assessment show them to each other.
  2. Then the members are asked. A six-question anonymous survey goes to the congregation. It is a required companion to the leadership's own reading, not an afterthought.
  3. The two readings are compared. Where the leadership and the members differ, the gap is shown — because a leadership that believes members are being cared for personally, and members who say otherwise, have found something worth their attention.
  4. The congregation decides what to work on. The report names one area to attend to and the practices that go with it, drawn from the model rather than invented for the occasion.

A cycle has no fixed length. The elders set the pace: they answer when they answer, and nothing moves until every one of them has finished. The member survey is the only part with a clock on it — the links stay live for thirty days, and the elders can close the survey sooner once enough of the congregation has replied. A congregation that wants to take a month over it, and one that wants to be done in a fortnight, are both running it correctly.

Run again a year later, the same seven readings show movement in each area — against the congregation's own previous answer, never against anyone else's.

Why the elders answer independently

Where leadership disagree about the same congregation, that disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the page. It only survives if nobody could see which way the room was leaning first, which is why each elder's answers stay private until every one of them has finished.

It is also why the assessment cannot be completed by one person on everybody's behalf. A single reading of a congregation is one elder's opinion; an independent reading from every elder is information.

What members are promised

The member survey is anonymous by design, not by policy. Nothing records who answered, and there is no way for anyone to work out afterwards which answers were whose — not the elders, and not us. The system holds no link between a survey response and the person who submitted it, because no such link is ever created.

Answers are shown to the leadership only as totals, and not at all until at least five members have responded. That threshold has no override, for anyone. Below it the cycle still completes and the report says how many answered; only the comparison with the members is missing.

A member who has received a survey email and wants to check it is genuine can read the page written for exactly that.

Sample report

This is the document a congregation receives at the end of a cycle, produced for Fairview Church of Christ — the same congregation as the video, and one that does not exist. It shows the seven areas read separately, how many members responded, and the one area the model points to next together with the practices that go with it.

It is deliberately a partial copy. The full report describes each of the seven areas twice over — where the congregation reads now, and what the next step up from there looks like — in the model's own words. This copy does that for that one area only, because publishing all seven would publish the model itself. The leadership-against-members comparison is shown in the assessment rather than in this document.

No hierarchy in the questions

The model assumes the New Testament pattern for the local church — elders, deacons, evangelists and ministers — and a congregation answerable to no structure above it. There is no denominational hierarchy in the questions because there is none in the church.

The report names where a congregation is and what maturing looks like from there. It does not grade a congregation against a standard it was never consulted about.

Getting started

The assessment is used by invitation. We are glad to walk your elders through what a cycle involves and what the report says at the end of it.

Talk to us about a cycle Sign in to the assessment

Signing in is for congregations already taking part. If yours is not yet, write to us instead.