Did you get an email asking a few questions about your congregation?
It is from us, and it was sent at the request of your congregation's own leadership.
The elders are working through an assessment of how the congregation is doing, and part of that is hearing from members. The email contains a link to six questions and takes a few minutes.
Your answers are anonymous. Nothing records who answered. There is no way for anyone to work out afterwards which answers were yours — not the elders, and not us. Answers are only ever shown to the leadership as totals, and not at all until at least five members have responded.
The link works once, and only for you. That is why we ask you not to forward it — not to keep anything secret, but so that one member answering is counted once. It also stops working thirty days after it was sent, or sooner if your elders have closed the survey. If yours has stopped working, nothing has gone wrong and nobody is at fault — ask an elder whether it is still open.
Still not sure? Ask one of your elders whether the congregation is running an assessment. They will know, and that is a better check than anything a website can tell you.
Why the email may have arrived in junk
Mail from a new domain to an address it has never written to before is often filed as junk automatically. It is not a sign that anything is wrong. If a member of your family or a friend at the congregation was expecting the survey and has not seen it, the junk folder is the first place to look.
What the assessment is
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. It looks at seven areas of congregational life:
- Leadership & Organizational Structure
- Member Involvement & Ownership
- Worship, Teaching & Discipleship
- Evangelism
- Benevolence
- Financial Stewardship
- Multiplication & Sending
Each of the seven is read on its own. There is no single score and no overall grade, because a congregation strong in benevolence and quiet in evangelism is not usefully described by one number — and averaging the two would hide the very thing worth talking about.
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. Where the leadership disagree about the same congregation, that disagreement is usually the most useful thing on the page, and it only survives if nobody could see which way the room was leaning first.
Then the members are asked
The survey is a required companion to the leadership's own reading, not an afterthought. Where the two 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.
Questions
Any member, elder or deacon is welcome to ask what this is and how it works before answering anything.
If you are part of the leadership and looking for the assessment itself, it is at cmm.kairosintelligence.org.