Fifty statements across ten dimensions. The scoring mathematics, the evidence base and the known limitations are published before you answer a single question — because an instrument you cannot inspect is an instrument you should not trust.
We will not restructure a church until it is well enough to be restructured.
If Leadership Health falls below 55, or Communication and Trust below 50 — on either group's reading — or leaders and members disagree by twenty points, the report leads with Restore, whatever else is low. The rule lives in the scoring engine rather than the marketing copy, and a test asserts that a uniformly strong profile can never suppress it.
Every dimension of the index belongs to one of them. The order is not stylistic. A church cannot be recalibrated while its leadership is unwell.
What has gone quiet can live again. Vitality, mission, and the church's presence in the place it actually stands.
Not more activity — better alignment. How people are formed, placed, governed and raised up to follow.
The fracture is where the light comes through. Leaders, trust and belonging — repaired before anything is rebuilt on top of them.
Attendance is the variable European congregations have least power to move, and the one that says least about faithfulness. Its absence is the clearest statement this instrument makes about what it thinks health is.
Dimensions are deliberately unweighted. There is no European dataset that would justify weighting one above another, and inventing weights would be exactly the false precision this instrument exists to avoid.
A footnote on this site can only cite a source that has already been checked. That is why there are a handful of long articles rather than hundreds: an article cannot be written faster than its sources can be verified.
In August 2026 we audited our own bibliography and withdrew a clergy-burnout statistic that church literature had been repeating for years. The primary document did not contain it. We would rather lose a striking number than keep one we cannot stand behind.
A low score is not a verdict on faithfulness, and decline is not automatically unfaithfulness. He builds it; we are asked to be faithful with what is in front of us.
Everything below is published before anyone answers a question: the items, the mathematics, the band boundaries, the rule that overrides them, and what this instrument cannot do. Band boundaries set out in advance cannot be moved afterwards to make a result look better or worse than it is.
Dimensions are deliberately unweighted. There is no European dataset that would justify weighting one above another.
The mean of the items answered, multiplied by twenty, expressed on 0–100. Fewer than three answered items reports insufficient data rather than a misleading number.
The unweighted mean of the dimensions that could be scored. Dimensions reporting insufficient data are left out — never counted as zero, because an absent score is not a low score.
Excluded entirely, from both the dimension and the overall. It never counts against a church. Honest ignorance is not a deficiency and is not scored as one.
| Flourishing | 85–100 | Strong across the board. The useful work here is protecting what is working and preparing for succession. |
| Healthy | 70–84 | Broadly healthy, with identifiable weak points. The lowest dimensions are where a conversation is most likely to be worth having. |
| Stable | 55–69 | Functioning, but with real strain in specific areas. This describes the present reading and does not predict what follows from it. |
| Vulnerable | 40–54 | Multiple dimensions under pressure at once. A church reading here is carrying more than one difficulty at the same time, which is a different problem from carrying any one of them. |
| At Risk | 25–39 | Significant difficulty across most of the instrument. The priority is stabilising leadership and trust before anything is restructured. |
| Critical | 0–24 | Serious difficulty. This score does not mean the church has failed, and it is not a verdict on faithfulness. It means most of the instrument is reading low at once, and that is not a situation we would advise anyone to carry alone. |
Here they are with their arithmetic, so you can check them rather than believe them.
Ten dimensions, five items each. The congregational mode is asked 47: three items ask about knowledge only leadership holds.
Derived, not observed: 542 words across the fifty statements at 130 words a minute of careful reading, plus six seconds an item to choose, and half as much again for re-reading. It will be replaced by the median from the first real readings.
The report is computed in your browser the moment the last response is in and the anonymity threshold is met. Comparable instruments state hours, days, or thirty days.
Not the same as the anonymity floor. Worked out below.
We publish an anonymity floor — 8 in a congregation, 4 on a leadership team — below which no scores are produced at all. That answers how few responses make a result disappear. It does not answer how many make it mean something, and a church reading only the first number could run a reading with nine people and treat the output as a finding.
The finding this instrument exists to produce is a gap between two groups, and the precision of a difference is governed by the smaller group — which in a church is always the leadership. That produces the table below, and one conclusion worth having before you start: past a point, adding congregational responses stops helping.
| 3 answering about their own leadership | no congregational sample is large enough |
| 4 answering about their own leadership | 98 congregational responses |
| 5 answering about their own leadership | 17 congregational responses |
| 6 answering about their own leadership | 11 congregational responses |
| 8 answering about their own leadership | 8 congregational responses |
| 10 answering about their own leadership | 7 congregational responses |
| 12 answering about their own leadership | 6 congregational responses |
A leadership team of three cannot support a gap finding at any congregational sample size — and is below the anonymity floor in any case. With four, you would need about a hundred congregational responses. With six, eleven will do. If your leadership group is small, the honest thing is to run the reading and discuss it together rather than to score the gap.
This is arithmetic, not evidence. There is no European dataset behind it. It assumes the spread of individual answers on a five-point scale is about one point, and that assumption is doing real work: at a narrower or wider spread the balanced figure moves — 0.8 → 5 and 5 · 1.0 → 8 and 8 · 1.2 → 12 and 12. Two American instruments arrive at about thirty responses by other routes, which is a check on the reasoning rather than support for it. All of this is replaced by the observed spread as soon as real readings exist.
We will not restructure a church until it is well enough to be restructured.
Three triggers. Any one of them makes the report lead with Restore, whatever else scores low. Triggers one and two read whichever group reports lower — a congregation reporting trust at 40 while leadership reports 92 is exactly the case this rule exists for.
Leadership Health scores below 55, on either group's reading.
Communication and Trust scores below 50, on either group's reading. The lower of the two is what counts.
Leadership and congregation differ by 20 points or more on any dimension.
Not a shortened version for members. Every question a member is asked is word for word the one leadership is asked, because a difference between two answers only means something when the question was identical.
A pastor can see almost every dimension of their own church from the inside. The one thing they cannot see is the distance between what they believe about it and what their people experience.
Pastors, elders, staff, and anyone carrying formal responsibility.
Three items are asked of leadership only — why people leave, where growth comes from, and three-year sustainability. A member can form an impression of those, but an impression of whether leadership knows something is a different construct, and scoring it would manufacture a gap that is an artefact of the question rather than a fact about the church.
Below eight congregational respondents the group score is suppressed, not caveated. A mean over four people plus one known answer gives away the sum of the rest, which in a group that small is usually enough to work out who said what — and an assessment that promised anonymity would have broken the promise. With a group that small we say so and suggest discussing the questions together instead.
Published in full, before anyone answers one.
Whether Christ, prayer and Scripture actually shape the church's life, or are stated values it has stopped practising. Measured because a church can go on naming these practices long after it has stopped keeping them, which makes them the place where the people inside are least likely to notice a change.
Isolation, role clarity, boundaries and shared load. A widely repeated Swedish register claim, ranking clergy among the highest-risk occupations for exhaustion syndrome, was withdrawn from this rationale in August 2026 after the primary report was retrieved and found not to contain the figures attributed to it. What survives verification is narrower and sufficient: the Church of England's Living Ministry panel finds ministerial wellbeing driven by role structure rather than by hours worked, with 40% of the clergy surveyed reporting that they feel isolated in their ministry and 16% showing indications of probable depression.8 A reported 69% of inspected religious workplaces in Sweden received improvement demands — confirmed here only at a secondary source, and cited as such.7
Whether a person can move from first visit to maturity along a path someone designed, or only by accident. Measured because Swedish survey data records religious change running differently between generations rather than simply downward — which is of no use to a church with nowhere for an interested person to go next.3
Whether people who arrive stay. Stefan Paas's peer-reviewed German study found church plants converting at roughly thirteen times the denominational average while losing 8–10% of members annually — real conversion growth, no net growth. He calls it a fast metabolism.9
Whether the congregation's activity is shaped by its mission or by its history, and whether faith is spoken about outside the building. Measured because European mission is now genuinely cross-cultural mission at home: in France, adult baptisms have more than tripled in ten years, and those with no religious tradition now form a large share of new adult converts.2218
Whether the volunteer system works, separately from how many people attend. Volunteers in the Church of Sweden fell from over 70,000 in 2019 to nearly 35,000 in 2023, and its own research found many parishes have no volunteer strategy at all.1314
Whether members understand how decisions are made, whether difficult news travels openly, and whether conflict is addressed. Leadership and congregation can hold sharply different views here without either side being dishonest, which is why the instrument asks both rather than either.
Whether the church is known and useful to people who will never attend it. In the UK, 76% of churches host community groups and 85% say they would expand that work with more resources.24 A Danish claim about public attitudes to the church previously stood here and was removed in August 2026: the source cited for it reports membership counts and cannot support a statement about what the population thinks.34
Whether the structure fits the church as it is now rather than as it was, whether finances are transparent, and whether commitments are sustainable. Nominal church income in Germany is still rising while membership falls; the EKD's own published projection expects that to reverse.1517 A budget built on the current figure is a budget built on a lagging indicator.
Whether young people belong rather than being catered to, and whether anyone is being prepared to lead. Succession in ministry runs on a long clock: the Church of England's own clergy wellbeing panel reports a substantial share of serving clergy approaching retirement, and no tradition trains a replacement quickly.8 A church that starts looking for its next leaders when it needs them has already started late.
Nor a church's spiritual worth, nor the faithfulness of its leaders, nor the presence or the work of the Holy Spirit. What is scored is observable organisational and ministry indicators, and nothing else. We measure what is observable and never pretend that is all there is.
Version 0.1, a draft. It has not been independently validated and has not yet been reviewed by Nordic denominational leaders. This is on the methodology page rather than in the small print, because a church deciding whether to trust the result deserves to know what it is trusting.
Not professional, legal, financial, employment, medical or clinical advice — and never the sole basis for a decision affecting a person's employment, ministry, discipline or wellbeing. Using it in an appraisal will also end honest answering in your church permanently.
Swedish awaits native theological review, and the locale says so on the page. Translation error in a measurement instrument does not announce itself — it appears as a dimension that scores oddly in one country.
We withdrew a clergy-burnout statistic that church literature had been repeating for years. The primary document did not contain it.
The figure was attributed to a Swedish state register study. We retrieved that study. It ranks no occupations at all — its results sit in a table appendix that is not separately published, and its own headline occupational findings are healthcare, animal care, pharmacy and security. Clergy do not appear.
The finding appears to originate in a report from twelve years earlier, circulating since as though it were current. It is unverified, not disproven — the numbers may sit in that unpublished appendix. So the entry carries a new status rather than disappearing, and nothing on this site rests on it.
The same audit corrected a misattributed co-author, a study cited under the title of a different book, a survey title paired with the wrong language's abbreviation, and a widely-repeated closure statistic that overstated what its source actually said.
Verified at source
Confirmed at a secondary source; primary document not retrieved
Primary document retrieved; it does not contain the figure attributed to it. No claim on this site rests on this source.
| 01 | Svenska kyrkan. "Svenska kyrkans medlemsutveckling 1972–2024." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 02 | Bromander, Jonas. "Långsiktig projektion av Svenska kyrkans medlemsutveckling." Svenska kyrkan. Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 03 | Hagevi, Magnus. "Sakralisering efter sekularisering? Religiös förändring över tid och mellan generationer." In I rörelse, 65–80. Göteborg: SOM-institutet, Göteborgs universitet, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 04 | Försäkringskassan. Sjukfrånvaro i psykiatriska diagnoser: En registerstudie av Sveriges arbetande befolkning i åldern 20–69 år. Socialförsäkringsrapport 2020:8. Stockholm: Försäkringskassan, 2020. Accessed August 29, 2026. | Primary document retrieved; it does not contain the figure attributed to it. No claim on this site rests on this source. |
| 05 | Lidwall, Ulrik, Sofia Bill, Edward Palmer, and Christina Olsson Bohlin. Sjukfrånvaro i psykiska diagnoser: En studie av Sveriges befolkning 16–64 år. Socialförsäkringsrapport 2014:4. Stockholm: Försäkringskassan, 2014. Accessed August 29, 2026. | Confirmed at a secondary source; primary document not retrieved |
| 06 | Kyrkans Akademikerförbund. "Präster och diakoner löper störst risk att drabbas av stressrelaterad ohälsa och utmattningssyndrom." March 1, 2023. Accessed August 29, 2026. | Primary document retrieved; it does not contain the figure attributed to it. No claim on this site rests on this source. |
| 07 | Gullberg, Anita. "Därför toppar kyrkan listan över psykisk ohälsa." Arbetsliv (Prevent), October 3, 2024. Accessed August 29, 2026. | Confirmed at a secondary source; primary document not retrieved |
| 08 | Tweedie, Fiona, and Liz Graveling Fox, with Charlotte Hobson and Elaine Farrow. ‘Lord, for the Years’: Clergy Wellbeing 2017–2025. Living Ministry Panel Survey Wave 5. London: Church of England, December 2025. | Verified at source |
| 09 | Paas, Stefan. "A Case Study of Church Growth by Church Planting in Germany: Are They Connected?" International Bulletin of Mission Research 42, no. 1 (January 2018): 40–54. | Verified at source |
| 10 | Paas, Stefan, and Alrik Vos. "Church Planting and Church Growth in Western Europe: An Analysis." International Bulletin of Mission Research 40, no. 3 (July 2016): 243–252. | Verified at source |
| 11 | Paas, Stefan. Church Planting in the Secular West: Learning from the European Experience. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2016. | Verified at source |
| 12 | Sveriges Frikyrkosamråd. Frikyrkoundersökningen. Reported in Dagen, "Fortsatt nedgång för frikyrkorna enligt Frikyrkoundersökningen." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 13 | "Antalet frivilliga i Svenska kyrkan har halverats på fyra år." Dagen, November 27, 2024. Reporting research by Sara Fransson. | Verified at source |
| 14 | Fransson, Sara, Jonas Bromander, and Johan von Essen. Av fri vilja på fri tid: ideellt arbete i Svenska kyrkans barn- och ungdomsverksamhet på 2020-talet. Uppsala: Svenska kyrkan, 2021. | Verified at source |
| 15 | Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland. "Evangelische Kirche veröffentlicht Mitgliedszahlen für das Jahr 2025." March 16, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 16 | Forschungsgruppe Weltanschauungen in Deutschland. "Kirchenmitglieder Ende 2025: 43,8 Prozent." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 17 | Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland. Kirche im Umbruch: Zwischen demografischem Wandel und nachlassender Kirchenverbundenheit. Projection by the Forschungszentrum Generationenverträge, Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, under the direction of Bernd Raffelhüschen. Hannover: EKD, May 2019. | Verified at source |
| 18 | Pew Research Center. How the Global Religious Landscape Changed from 2010 to 2020, "Religion in Europe." Washington, DC: Pew Research Center, June 9, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 19 | Pew Research Center. "Has There Been a Christian Revival among Young Adults in the UK? Recent Surveys May Be Misleading." January 23, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 20 | "Bible Society Says That Its Quiet Revival Report Was Based on a 'Faulty' Survey." Church Times, March 26, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 21 | "UK's Bible Society on the Defensive after Retracting Report on Revival." Religion News Service, April 1, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 22 | Conférence des évêques de France. "Enquête du catéchuménat 2026: les baptêmes adultes et adolescents en chiffres." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 23 | Bundesamt für Statistik. Religion und Spiritualität in der Schweiz: Ergebnisse der Erhebung zur Sprache, Religion und Kultur 2024. BFS-Nummer 1368-2400. Neuchâtel: BFS, June 23, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 24 | National Churches Trust. The National Churches Survey: Giving Every Church a Voice. London: National Churches Trust, October 2025. | Verified at source |
| 25 | Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek. "Daling aandeel mensen dat aangeeft bij religie te horen stagneert." 2025. | Verified at source |
| 26 | Gloo, and Barna Group. "Majority of Pastors Use AI in Ministry amid Concerns and Caution, New Research Finds." June 16, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 27 | Church of England. Statistics for Mission 2024. London: Church of England Data Services, October 2025. | Verified at source |
| 28 | Myndigheten för ungdoms- och civilsamhällesfrågor. "Trossamfund: antal betjänade." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 29 | Equmeniakyrkan. Årsredovisning 2024. Stockholm: Equmeniakyrkan, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 30 | Lemos, Carlos, and Ivan Puga-Gonzalez. "Belief in God, Confidence in the Church and Secularization in Scandinavia." Secularism and Nonreligion 10, no. 1 (2021): 5. | Verified at source |
| 31 | Center for the Study of Global Christianity. Status of Global Christianity, 2026. South Hamilton, MA: Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 32 | Den norske kirke. "Flere innom kirken i 2025." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 33 | Suomen evankelis-luterilainen kirkko. "Kirkkoon liittyneiden määrä jatkaa nousuaan." February 5, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 34 | Folkekirken. "Medlemmer af folkekirken." Accessed August 28, 2026. | Verified at source |
| 35 | Svenska kyrkan. Nyckeln till Svenska kyrkan 2025, kap. 6. Uppsala: Svenska kyrkan, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 36 | Myndigheten för ungdoms- och civilsamhällesfrågor. Så tycker unga 2025: hälsa, fritid och framtid. Stockholm: MUCF, May 14, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 37 | National Centre for Social Research. British Social Attitudes Survey, 2024 [BSA 42]. 2nd ed. Data collection. UK Data Service, 2026. SN 9478. https://doi.org/10.5255/UKDA-SN-9478-2. | Verified at source |
| 38 | Curtice, John. "Is There a Religious Revival in Britain?" National Centre for Social Research, December 22, 2025. | Verified at source |
| 39 | Curtice, John. "No Revival in Sight: Church Attendance in Britain Remains below Pre-Pandemic Levels." National Centre for Social Research, May 18, 2026. | Verified at source |
A footnote on this site may only cite an entry that already exists here with a status attached. That is why there are a handful of long articles rather than hundreds: an article cannot be written faster than its sources can be checked. The rate limit is verification, not writing.
Everything below is load-bearing. Each passage is attached to something the methodology actually does — a question the instrument asks, a rule the scoring engine applies, a boundary we hold. Scripture is not decoration here, and we would rather use less of it well than more of it loosely.
These are not services we sell. They are what we hope the work serves.
Many parts, one body. A church that cannot hold difference cannot hold mission.
That they may all be one; even as you, Father, are in me, and I in you, that they also may be one in us.
What has gone quiet can live again. This is the conviction underneath Revitalize.
Behold, I will cause breath to enter into you, and you shall live.
The fracture is where the light comes through. This is what Restore is for.
He has sent me to bind up the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives.
God still acts. We measure what is observable and never pretend that is all there is.
God also testifying with them, both by signs and wonders, by various works of power.
Not the mood of a service. The strength a congregation draws on when the work is hard.
The joy of Yahweh is your strength.
Not the absence of conflict. The presence of trust — which is why the instrument measures it.
Peace I leave with you. My peace I give to you; not as the world gives, give I to you.
Wind and fire. The Church is not an organisation we optimise; it is a body he animates.
You will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you.
| Colossians 1:18 | He is the head of the body, the assembly ... The church is not ours to optimise. This is why the index scores organisational and ministry indicators and never claims to measure God's approval, a church's spiritual worth, or the presence of the Spirit. |
| Ephesians 4:12 | ... for the perfecting of the saints, to the work of serving, to the building up of the body of Christ. Leaders exist to equip the body, not to perform for it. This is why the instrument measures leadership development rather than leadership performance, and why the engagement ends with capability transfer. |
| 1 Corinthians 12:7 | To each one is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the profit of all. Congregational engagement is a body function, not a volunteer-recruitment problem. This is why Volunteer Capacity asks whether people are placed by gifting, not only by availability. |
| 2 Timothy 2:2 | ... commit the same things to faithful men, who will be able to teach others also. Four generations in one sentence. Every engagement should leave a church able to run its own next cycle. A consultant who becomes indispensable has failed. |
| Matthew 6:33 | But seek first God's Kingdom, and his righteousness; and all these things will be given to you as well. Order matters. Health precedes growth. It is why this practice does not sell growth, and says so on its pricing page. |
| Matthew 28:19–20 | Go and make disciples of all nations… teaching them to observe all things whatsoever I commanded you. Make disciples, not attenders. This is why there is no attendance question in the instrument and why Retention and Belonging is measured instead. |
| Matthew 16:18 | I will build my assembly, and the gates of Hades will not prevail against it. He builds it. We are asked to be faithful with what is in front of us. This is why a low score is not a verdict on faithfulness, and why decline is not automatically unfaithfulness. |
| Acts 2:42–47 | They continued steadfastly in the apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread and prayer. Teaching, fellowship, table, prayer — a whole life together, not a weekly event. The ten dimensions of the index are an attempt to look at that whole life rather than at one hour of it. |
English quotations are from the World English Bible; Swedish from Bibel 1917. Both are public domain. Every quotation should be verified against a printed text before launch — the standard this practice applies to its statistics applies to its Scripture, and more so.
Not quoted on request. A church deciding whether to talk to us should be able to find out what it costs without giving us their email address first.
Every instrument, every report Both instruments, both respondent modes, the group reading, the perception gap and the full report. No account, no email, no paywall on any part of the output. If the software can produce it, you can have it. | €0 |
An interpretation conversation Forty-five minutes with the person who built the instrument, reading your report with you. Free, and strongly urged where a Restore trigger has fired — that is the reading most easily misread by the church it describes. | €0 |
Guided reading, for a leadership team Four online sessions of seventy-five minutes, for a leadership team of up to eight. We run your reading together, decide what it means, and leave you with the first ninety days written down. Published dates, booked without talking to anyone first. | €149–349 |
Diagnose, Discern, Design The full engagement, described by what it produces rather than by how many days it occupies: the reading, the interpretation, and a strategy with names and dates against it. What moves the price is the size of the church and whether a congregational reading is run. | €2,500–4,500 |
Implementation partnership Six to twelve months. Every engagement is built to end — the measure of our work is whether your church can run its own next cycle without us. | €300–650 / month |
Published prices are indicative; the price for a specific engagement is confirmed in writing before work begins. Where free denominational training would serve you better, we will say so and point you to it.
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The same questions either way. Which group you are in decides how your answers are read and compared, and three items are asked of leadership only.
Your answers are stored in this browser and are never transmitted. There is no submit step, because there is nowhere for it to submit to.
The Church Health Index measures the organisation. The Leadership Health Assessment measures the people leading it, in three modes, and carries guardrails this one does not — because an instrument that rates a named person can do damage this one cannot.
Begin the Leadership Health Assessment →That single difference changes what the tool is capable of doing to someone, and it is why this instrument carries guardrails the other does not. A church survives a badly run congregational survey. A pastor can be ended by a badly run leadership one.
That is not a disclaimer written by a lawyer. It is enforced in the design: there is no free-text field anywhere in this instrument, the minimum group sizes are held in code rather than in guidance, and a suppressed group carries no scores at all rather than scores marked unreliable.
Printed on the instrument, in the report, and in the terms. Not in small print, and not once.
It must not be used in a performance review, a disciplinary process, a dismissal, or as evidence in any dispute. Beyond the ethical problem, doing so after inviting anonymous participation will end honest answering in this church permanently.
If there is a concern about someone's conduct or safety, it belongs with your denomination's safeguarding officer today, not in a five-point scale. There is deliberately nowhere in this instrument to write it down.
Low scores on Emotional Maturity and Care describe how leadership is experienced, not a clinical state. Nothing here is licensed mental-health assessment, and where that is what is needed we refer rather than improvise.
It is a reading of how leadership is currently experienced by the people asked. Most of what this instrument surfaces is structural — load, isolation, unclear accountability — and structural problems are the ones that respond to design.
Self and team both rate the senior leader, so that comparison is like-for-like and it is the one the report leans on. The congregation rates the leadership as a body — asking a member to score one named person on integrity is an invitation to settle scores, and most members cannot see an individual leader's accountability arrangements, delegation, or whether they rest.
All three answer all fifty. Unlike the Church Health Index there are no mode-only items here: a member's read on whether leaders keep confidences is as valid as the leader's own, and is often the more useful of the two. What changes between modes is the wording, not the question.
Three elders could work out who said what about the senior leader in an afternoon. In a team that size that is not a privacy inconvenience — it is the end of anyone in that church answering honestly again. Below the minimum the answers are held and reported only if more of the team completes it. Congregation stays at eight, as in the Church Health Index.
Say what it is for before you send it, and say what will happen to the results. Decide who sees the report before anyone answers, and tell them — changing that afterwards is the single most damaging thing a church can do with this instrument. Do not collect names, and do not ask people to hand forms back to the person being rated. Group readings and the gap report are part of an engagement, where the scoring runs in Python against the same published rules.
Any one of these makes the report lead with the leader's own care and accountability, ahead of anything strategic. Thresholds read whichever group scores lower — never the leader's own account of themselves alone.
A difference of twenty points or more on any dimension is reported. The wording is fixed and deliberately even-handed: it says the two sides are not working from the same picture, and notes that the side scoring higher is the side that cannot see the difference. It does not say who is right. Only the leader-versus-team comparison is like-for-like; gaps involving the congregation carry the caveat that they rated a different subject, and are printed after the like-for-like ones so they cannot be mistaken for the stronger evidence.
Your answers are stored in this browser and are never transmitted. There is no submit step, because there is nowhere for it to submit to. On an instrument that asks a leader whether anyone would tell them if they were crossing a line, that is not a feature — it is the precondition for a true answer.
Version 0.1, a draft. Not academically validated, not reviewed by Nordic denominational leaders, and not yet completed by a church. The thresholds 55, 50 and 20 are reasoned judgements about where a reading stops being a weak point and starts being the thing to deal with first — they are not derived from a dataset, because no European dataset exists that could derive them.
Fifty statements about one named ministry, across ten dimensions. Run it against youth, worship and hospitality and you get three numbers on the same scale — and the comparison between them is usually the finding, not any one of them alone.
Not one, anywhere in the fifty. A ministry with sixty people and no disciples is not healthier than one with nine and three. The instrument refuses the opposite error just as firmly: a ministry can be small, quiet and entirely healthy, and nothing here reads size as a signal in either direction.
Five statements each, fifty in all, every one of them about the ministry you name. Each dimension belongs to one of the three movements.
Whether this ministry has a reason for existing that its leaders can state, its volunteers recognise and the wider church shares. Measured first because every other dimension is read against it: a ministry doing excellently something nobody can name the point of is not doing well.
Whether the people leading this ministry are supported, clear about what they carry, and able to say when it is too much. This is the dimension that takes precedence: a ministry can produce visible fruit for years on leaders who are quietly running out, and the fruit is what everyone looks at.
Whether serving here is sustainable for the people who do it. Measured separately from leadership because the two fail separately: a well-supported leader can still preside over a rota that is grinding people down, and the people on it rarely say so.
Whether anyone is actually being formed here, or whether the ministry is running an activity well. The distinction is the whole of Phase 8: a programme can be full, popular and produce nothing that outlasts it.
Whether people who come are known, and whether those who stop coming are noticed. Deliberately not a count. A ministry of nine who are known is not weaker than a ministry of sixty who are not.
Whether this ministry is a door into the church for people outside it, or a room for people already in. Both are legitimate; a church that believes a ministry is the first and finds it is the second has learned something it needed to know.
What this ministry consumes in money, hours, building and attention, set against what the church believes it returns. Not a judgement that cheap is good. A proportion that nobody has ever examined is the finding.
What happens if the person who carries this stops. Measured because the answer is very often 'it ends', and because that is knowable years before it happens and almost never written down.
Whether this ministry makes leaders as well as using them. A ministry that has never produced anyone able to lead it is not necessarily failing, but it is one person away from not existing.
Whether this ministry still answers a need the church actually has, or a need it had when the ministry began. Churches inherit ministries the way houses inherit furniture, and asking is neither disloyal nor a prelude to closing anything.
Three vantage points, fewer than the Leadership Health Assessment, because a ministry has fewer that are worth telling apart. All three answer all fifty.
You lead this ministry, or share leading it.
You serve in this ministry without leading it.
You are part of this church and see this ministry from outside it.
Neither changes a number. Both change what a reader meets first, which on an instrument like this one matters more.
If Leadership & Care reads below 55, or Volunteer Health below 50, the report leads with Restore however well the outcome dimensions read. A ministry producing good fruit on the backs of exhausted people is not healthy, and 'do more of it' is the wrong advice.
If Purpose and Strategic Relevance both read low while Resources reads high, the report asks plainly whether this ministry should continue. It is not a recommendation to end anything, and the instrument is not competent to make one. It is the observation that the question is worth asking out loud.
Your answers, the ministry you chose and what you wrote about why it exists are stored in this browser and are never transmitted. There is no submit step, because there is nowhere for it to submit to.
One reading names one ministry. The fifty statements are worded around whichever you choose, so the language stays natural. Run it again for the next one.
Version 0.1, a draft. Not academically validated, not yet run against a real church, and the Swedish is machine-assisted and awaits review. The thresholds are reasoned judgements, not figures derived from a dataset — no European dataset exists that could derive them.
Tell us where your church is. We will tell you what we would look at first — and if the honest answer is that you do not need a consultant, or that free denominational training would serve you better, we will say so and point you to it.
You describe the situation. We ask questions. We do not present anything.
Revitalize, Recalibrate or Restore — and why, in plain terms.
No follow-up sequence. If you want to go further you will tell us.
Every instrument and every report €0 · Guided reading for a leadership team €149–349 · Full engagement €2,500–4,500 · Implementation partnership €300–650 per month.
This sends your request to us by email. We reply within two working days and propose times then — there is no calendar to pick a slot from, because we would rather find a time that suits you than have you fit into a grid.
This is not a crisis service, a counselling service, or a safeguarding process. If someone is in danger, contact your local emergency services and your denomination's safeguarding officer.
Pastoral health consulting is organisational and vocational work. It is not licensed mental-health treatment, and we will refer rather than improvise where that is what is needed.
A church consulting practice serving the European Union and the United States, built on one conviction: health precedes growth, and growth without health magnifies dysfunction.
His work seeks to bring together theology, church health, leadership, strategy and implementation.
The same rule the instruments are held to applies to the person behind them. Nothing below appears on this page until it has been verified against a primary source, and a placeholder that says so is worth more than a paragraph that reads well.
No award, client number, church-growth figure, endorsement or consulting result will appear on this page at any point, verified or not. Those are not withheld pending confirmation; they are outside what this practice publishes about itself.
American church-growth methodology does not transfer intact into a post-Christian European context, and applying it unchanged is how a Swedish or Dutch congregation ends up measured against a standard that was never about them. Every dimension in this instrument was chosen against European evidence.
We will tell you so and point you to it. A practice that cannot say 'you do not need us' is a practice whose recommendations cannot be trusted.
A working evidence base for the European church, assembled from named sources and published with its own gaps attached. Every figure below carries what kind of statement it is.
Published in English only for now. The rest of this site is bilingual. These pages are not, because a machine-translated statistic is a liability rather than a courtesy, and the Swedish already in the instrument is itself awaiting native theological review.
This page collects the figures we are willing to publish about the church in northern and western Europe, together with the year each figure describes, the population it covers and the source it came from. It is not a summary of the field. It is the subset of the field that survived checking.
The distinction matters because the most widely circulated European church statistic of the past two years was withdrawn in March 2026 and is still in circulation. Leaders are making decisions about property, staffing and succession on evidence that in some cases no longer exists. So each statement below is labelled: a measured figure, an analyst's reading of one, a modelled forecast, or something we could not confirm. Where a source's own wording is narrower than the way it is usually quoted, the narrower wording is used and the difference is stated.
The gaps are set out at the same length as the findings. A research programme is defined as much by what it cannot yet answer as by what it can, and several of the questions that matter most for European churches between now and 2040 have no published European data behind them at all.
A figure published by a named source, retrieved at that source. The year and the population it describes are stated with it.
A reading of data rather than a measurement. Traceable to the evidence cited, but arguable, and other readings of the same figures exist.
A modelled forecast, not an observation. Published projections of European church decline have so far run behind what was subsequently measured, so these are the least reliable statements on the page.
A claim in circulation that we could not verify at a primary source. Recorded here because its absence matters, and because it is repeated elsewhere as though settled. Unverified is not the same as disproven.
Register-based membership is the best-measured thing in European church life, because in several countries the state keeps the count. It is also the measure that says least about practice.
Church of Sweden membership fell from 7,754,784 people, or 95.2 per cent of the Swedish population, in 1972 to 5,426,053, or 51.4 per cent, in 2024.
The Church of Sweden's own long-range projection puts its membership at 4,384,637 people, or 39.8 per cent of the Swedish population, in 2040, and at 3,868,857 in 2051.
The Evangelical Church in Germany recorded 17.4 million members at 31 December 2025, a fall of 3.2 per cent on the previous year, against roughly 350,000 resignations and about 105,000 baptisms in that year.
At the end of 2025 the two large German churches together accounted for 43.8 per cent of the German population. Annual losses ran at roughly 1 per cent a year before 2016 and have run at roughly 3 per cent a year since 2022.
Pew Research Center measured 505 million Christians in Europe in 2020, 67 per cent of the region's population, down from 75 per cent in 2010, while the religiously unaffiliated rose to 190 million, or 25 per cent.
The Center for the Study of Global Christianity estimates 553,294,000 Christians in Europe in 2026, against 562,875,000 in 2000, and models 398,231,000 by 2075. The series counts affiliation rather than practice, includes Russia and eastern Europe, and is therefore not comparable with attendance figures.
Attendance and membership move at different speeds and in some countries in different directions. Where a source counts something other than membership, the definition is given.
Average weekly attendance across the Church of England fell from 864,000 in 2019 to 702,000 in 2024, a decline of 19 per cent, and average Sunday attendance from 716,000 to 581,000 over the same period.
Church of England baptisms and thanksgivings fell from 89,600 in 2019 to 61,600 in 2024, weddings and services of prayer and dedication from 31,700 to 21,600, and funerals from 114,700 to 87,400.
John Curtice's analysis for the National Centre for Social Research, published in May 2026, concludes that church attendance in Britain remains below its pre-pandemic level.
In the Netherlands 44 per cent of people aged 15 and over identified with a religious group in 2024, against 55 per cent in 2010, and 14 per cent attended a service at least monthly. Statistics Netherlands described the decline in religious belonging as having stagnated.
The Swiss Federal Statistical Office's 2024 survey on language, religion and culture records 38 per cent of the Swiss population believing in one God, against 46 per cent ten years earlier. The 36 per cent with no religious affiliation reported alongside it comes from the 2023 structural survey, not from the 2024 survey.
Swedish state subsidy statistics count betjänade, defined as members of a religious community or people who take part regularly in its activities and self-reported by each denomination. The gap from membership is large: Equmeniakyrkan reported 96,460 betjänade for 2024, a year in which its own audited accounts recorded 57,118 members.
This is the most contaminated topic in the field. One widely cited study has been retracted, several others rest on opt-in online panels, and the strongest evidence comes from probability-based series that were never translated into English.
The Bible Society and YouGov report The Quiet Revival, published in April 2025 and widely cited for the claim that monthly church attendance among British 18–24-year-olds rose from 4 per cent in 2018 to 16 per cent in 2024, was retracted in March 2026 after YouGov confirmed that quality controls on the 2024 sample had not been functioning. YouGov accepted responsibility for the result.
Pew Research Center's January 2026 analysis of British random-probability surveys found that the share of Christians aged 18–34 attending church at least monthly fell from 8 per cent in 2018 to 6 per cent in 2024, and that Christian identification in the same age group fell from 37 per cent in early 2018 to 28 per cent in summer 2025.
John Curtice's December 2025 analysis of the British Social Attitudes series concludes that the survey evidence does not support the claim of a religious revival in Britain.
Magnus Hagevi's 2025 analysis of the SOM Institute's Swedish survey series finds that belief in God and regular prayer among Swedes aged 16–24 have risen from a trough in the early 2010s to sit at or above the levels recorded for older age groups in 2024. The series is published as graphs rather than tables, so no precise values can be quoted from it.
Hagevi's own summary is that the secularisation of the Swedish people appears to have stopped, or at least to have taken a pause. He does not claim that the pause is permanent, and youth service attendance in 2024 remains well below its late-1980s level.
The Swedish youth and civil society agency's 2025 survey Så tycker unga records 21.2 per cent of Swedes aged 16–29 describing themselves as believers and 49.4 per cent as not believers, with 21.7 per cent saying religion is very or quite important to them.
The two European growth signals that survive scrutiny come from an institutional census and a national statistics office rather than from surveys. Both are clear about direction and small in absolute scale.
Adult baptisms at Easter recorded by the French bishops' conference catechumenate survey rose from 4,124 in 2016 to 13,234 in 2026, alongside more than 8,100 adolescent baptisms recorded across 89 dioceses in 2026.
In the 2026 French catechumenate survey the largest single age band among adult catechumens is 18–25, and women outnumber men in every adult age band except those aged over 65.
Set against a French population of roughly 68 million, the 13,234 adult baptisms of 2026 amount to about 0.02 per cent of the population in that year, which makes the series a strong signal about who is converting and a weak one about how many.
Active joins to the Church of Sweden rose from just under 6,000 a year in 2010 to about 15,000 in 2024, and 17 per cent of confirmands were baptised at confirmation in 2024, against 10 per cent in 2021.
The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Finland recorded 25,000 people joining in 2025, up from 23,000 the previous year, against 50,400 leaving, down from 51,300. The largest joining age group was 30–39.
The Church of Norway recorded 4.6 million service participants in 2025, an increase of 1.5 per cent achieved across roughly 1,300 fewer services, so that average attendance per service rose from 80 to 84.
The peer-reviewed European evidence on church planting is more sceptical than the sector that cites it. New congregations convert at many times the denominational rate and lose members at a rate that cancels most of it.
The Swedish free church survey Frikyrkoundersökningen records the number of free church congregations falling from 2,224 to 2,024 over its most recent five-year period, with 273 congregations closing and 77 newly established.
The same survey finds 89 Swedish municipalities in which free church membership is now below 1 per cent of the population, and records decline in the metropolitan regions for the first time.
Equmeniakyrkan's audited accounts record 641 congregations and 59,573 members in 2021 falling to 605 congregations and 57,118 members in 2024, with an operating result of minus 24.3 million Swedish kronor in 2024.
Stefan Paas's study of the Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden, covering nearly 500 German churches and about 40,000 members between 2011 and 2015, records overall annual growth of 0.76 per cent, one convert per 119 members a year, and growth of 42.3 per cent among churches planted between 2006 and 2015.
The same study records annual losses of 8 to 10 per cent from departures in those younger congregations, a pattern Paas calls a fast metabolism: churches that attract newcomers at many times the denominational rate without retaining them, so that conversion growth does not become net growth.
Paas and Vos's 2016 analysis of three small Reformed denominations in the Netherlands found that younger congregations gained roughly four times as many converts and five times as many returnees as older ones, which the authors attribute to location, outreach effort and entrepreneurial leadership.
Volunteer capacity moves independently of attendance and is measured far less often. Buildings are the largest long-term liability in European Christianity and the hardest to alter.
The number of volunteers in the Church of Sweden fell from over 70,000 in 2019 to nearly 35,000 in 2023, roughly halving in four years, according to research by Sara Fransson reported in November 2024.
Church of Sweden research into voluntary work in children's and youth ministry found the proportion of volunteer leaders in confirmation work nearly doubling between 1998 and 2019, over a period in which confirmation among 15-year-olds fell from 47 to 22 per cent, and found that many parishes have no clear strategy for volunteer work.
The National Churches Trust's 2025 survey of 3,628 UK churches found 83 per cent saying successful building management depends on active volunteers, 45 per cent reporting that a lack of volunteer time limits the community activity they can provide, against 33 per cent in 2010, and an average congregation relying on 265 hours of unpaid service a month.
The same survey counts about 38,500 churches, chapels and meeting houses in the UK in 2025, roughly half of them listed, with one in ten needing urgent repair within twelve months and more than a third of roofs at risk or needing urgent repair.
One in twenty churches in that survey said they felt they would definitely or probably not be used as a place of worship in five years' time. That is a self-reported expectation about future worship use, not an assessment of closure risk, and the report does not express it as a percentage.
The Freiburg projection published by the Evangelical Church in Germany in 2019, with a 2017 baseline, models Protestant membership falling from 21.5 million to 10.5 million by 2060 and projects church tax revenue alongside it. The figure covers Protestant membership only; the study publishes no combined Protestant and Catholic total.
The only quantitative clergy wellbeing data we could verify for Europe is British. A widely repeated Swedish finding is recorded here as unconfirmed rather than dropped, because it is being cited elsewhere as settled.
The Church of England's Living Ministry panel survey, whose fifth and final wave was published in December 2025 with around 500 clergy responding, found 40 per cent of clergy feeling isolated in their ministry context.
The same survey found 16 per cent of clergy reporting symptoms consistent with probable depression and a further 13 per cent with possible or mild depression. Press coverage summing these to around 29 per cent quotes a figure the report itself does not print.
The same survey found 62 per cent of clergy rating their overall health as good or excellent and 72 per cent feeling they are fulfilling their sense of vocation, alongside 6 per cent meeting its burnout threshold and 41 per cent reporting a sense of personal ineffectiveness.
The claim that Swedish clergy top the occupational ranking for stress-related illness is widely repeated but cannot at present be verified. It appears to originate in a 2014 register study by the Swedish Social Insurance Agency, and the specific risk ratios attributed to that study's 2020 successor do not appear in the retrievable text of the later report.
The Church of Norway recorded 6,700 participants aged 13–17 in its leadership courses in 2025, 10 per cent more than the previous year and 48 per cent above the 2019 level.
The livestream question closed in 2024. The AI question has not opened in Europe at all: the only survey evidence available is from the United States.
The Church of England's Statistics for Mission 2024 records Church at Home attendance in 2024 at approximately 30 per cent of its 2021 level, a fall of about 70 per cent from the pandemic peak.
The same return records roughly 5 per cent of Church of England worshipping communities in 2024 as consisting entirely of online worshippers.
A Barna survey of 442 US Protestant pastors conducted in December 2025 and published by Gloo in June 2026 found 87 per cent using AI in ministry, most often for brainstorming (50 per cent), graphic design (37 per cent) and biblical or theological research (36 per cent).
The same survey found 71 per cent of those pastors cautious about AI, 79 per cent worried that it could act as a replacement for God and 63 per cent worried that it could replace pastoral roles.
These are the questions a European church-health research programme would exist to close. They are listed here rather than in an internal file because a research page that publishes only what it found is advertising.
No survey of AI use among European churches, clergy or congregations could be located. The only quantitative evidence available anywhere is from the United States. Since US adoption reached 87 per cent of Protestant pastors within roughly three years, European use is likely to be substantial and is entirely unmeasured.
All clergy wellbeing data we could verify for Europe is British. For Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Switzerland we found no comparable quantitative study. The Swedish occupational-risk figures in circulation rest on a table appendix that has not been separately published.
There is no systematic count of migrant-led congregations for Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium or Switzerland. The academic literature is qualitative and case-based. Aggregate denominational statistics conceal both the growth and the high closure rate of these congregations.
Global and country-level estimates are published, but no Europe aggregate appears on open sources, and Pew's regional Pentecostal breakdown omits Europe. Any European total in circulation is derived rather than measured.
The Swedish collapse between 2019 and 2023 and the British constraint figures are the only volunteer series we could verify. There is no equivalent time series for Norway, Denmark or Finland, and no study isolates the cause of the Swedish fall.
Sweden publishes plant and closure counts through its five-year free church survey. Norway, Denmark and Finland do not publish a comparable series, so the Nordic planting picture rests on one country.
The Church of England publishes detailed digital engagement figures. No comparable statistics were found for German, French, Dutch, Belgian or Swiss churches, so the finding that livestreamed worship collapsed while discovery and devotional use grew rests on a single national case.
The most recent Belgian institutional attendance figures we could verify are for 2022. Nothing verifiable was found for 2023 to 2026.
No such dataset exists. Each national body defines closure, deconsecration, repurposing, demolition and transfer differently, so any Europe-wide total in circulation is an aggregation of incompatible national figures.
No major research body publishes a projection ending in 2040. Available projections end at 2050, 2060 or 2075, and two independent checks show that published projections have run behind subsequently measured decline. We therefore do not interpolate a 2040 figure from them.
A repeat of the retracted 2024 survey was commissioned in spring 2026. Until its results are published and its methodology can be examined, the British young-adult picture rests on random-probability series alone.
An annual State of the European Church report is a reasonable long-term aim and is not something this practice can currently produce. The infrastructure comes first, and it looks like this.
The strongest European church data is not produced by churches. Population registers, national statistical offices and state subsidy returns give counts that do not depend on anyone volunteering an answer. Where a register figure exists it is preferred to a survey figure, and where the two disagree both are reported.
Counts made by an institution of its own activity — baptisms, confirmations, joins and leavings, service attendance returns — are complete rather than sampled, and can be followed year on year. Their weakness is definitional drift, so the definition in force in each year has to be recorded alongside the number.
Long-running academic surveys with probability samples are the only usable source for belief, prayer and attitude. Opt-in online panels are recorded as opt-in and are never presented as measurement, because the failure that produced the 2026 retraction was specific to that method and specific to young respondents.
Several of the gaps above cannot be closed by better searching, only by fieldwork: European AI adoption, clergy wellbeing outside Britain, migrant-led congregation counts, and volunteer trends in Norway, Denmark and Finland. Each would need a defined population, a sampling frame and published methodology before any figure from it could be quoted.
An annual report on the European church would need three things that do not yet exist together: a stable set of definitions that national bodies would accept, at least one comparable series in each country covered, and a published verification procedure applied before rather than after publication. Until those are in place, the honest form is a standing register of verified findings and named gaps, revised as sources are retrieved or withdrawn.
A figure may be published only when it has been retrieved at its own source, and it is removed when that source is withdrawn or contradicted. Corrections are recorded in place rather than absorbed silently, so that the difference between what was believed and what was checked stays visible.
Bracketed numbers refer to the bibliography on the Evidence page, where every entry carries its verification status. Open the bibliography
Six stages, each with a stated input, a stated deliverable and a stated measure. Every service below carries who it is wrong for, because a service description that cannot say that is advertising.
Published in English only for now. The rest of this site is bilingual. These pages are not, because a machine-translated statistic is a liability rather than a courtesy, and the Swedish already in the instrument is itself awaiting native theological review.
Everything below is one of three things: work we can do this month, work designed and not yet built, or work we have decided not to do. Each entry says which, because that difference matters more to a church choosing a consultant than anything we could say about ourselves.
Two admissions belong here rather than in a footnote. The framework has not yet completed a full cycle with a congregation. And where free denominational support would serve you better, we will say so and point you to it.
A first conversation about where the church is, and whether we are the right people for it.
The instruments are answered and scored, alongside any public data for your area.
The report is read together, slowly, with prayer built into the day rather than added at the end.
The priorities become a plan built around the people and money the church has.
The church does the work. We appear at intervals agreed beforehand, not between them.
Capability moves from us to you, which is the point of the engagement.
Fifty statements across ten dimensions, scored by a published method. There is no attendance question.
It reads what a congregation can change: leadership health, discipleship, trust, engagement with the place the church stands, financial resilience, the next generation. The items, the mathematics and the known limitations are published before anyone answers.
It scores observable organisational indicators. It does not measure God's approval, a church's worth or the presence of the Holy Spirit, and a low score is not a verdict on faithfulness.
Fifty items answered three ways: the leader on themselves, the team on the leader, the congregation on the leadership as a body.
It rates a named person, which is why it is built as it is. There is no free-text field anywhere: a complaint about a person needs a safeguarding process, not a five-point scale. Small readings are suppressed entirely rather than published with a caveat.
Four refusals are printed on its face. Not an appraisal, not a safeguarding process, not a diagnosis, not a verdict on a person.
The finding a leadership team cannot produce alone: the distance between how leaders read the church and how members do.
Leadership answers fifty statements, the congregation forty-seven, because three ask about knowledge only leadership holds. Where the two differ widely the report names the gap, and declines to apportion blame for it.
The scoring exists and is held by tests. A way to collect the answers does not. These instruments transmit nothing, deliberately, and group responses would need storing somewhere with its own consent and deletion story.
Confidential work on the parts of the role that are organisational rather than spiritual: load, delegation, isolation, boundaries, decision rights.
The evidence points at structure more than at effort. Isolation and role design appear to bear on exhaustion more reliably than hours worked, so this starts with how the role is built rather than how hard someone is carrying it.
It is consulting and coaching, not licensed mental-health treatment, and we refer rather than improvise.
Work on what has gone quiet: prayer, formation, the church's account of the gospel, and its presence in the place it stands.
This is the movement most vulnerable to spiritual language standing in for structural change, so it is worked concretely. Who prays, and when. What is taught across a year. What the congregation could name, unprompted, as its part in the neighbourhood.
It is not an event and it does not promise attendance. Across much of Europe congregational growth is transfer between a shrinking number of congregations, which is not Kingdom growth.
Mission, values, vision, the discipleship pathway, and what happens in the next ninety days, twelve months and three years.
What comes out is not a statement for the foyer wall. It is decisions, each carrying a name and a date, alongside a list of what the church has chosen not to do this cycle. The second list is harder to write and does more work.
We will not run this for a church whose leadership health or trust sits below threshold. Restructuring a tired and distrustful team makes matters worse, and that refusal costs us engagements.
Giving patterns, donor concentration, the cost of staff and buildings, reserves, debt, and what the present shape can sustain.
Four keys. Track what is happening rather than what the annual report implies. Set a target that is arithmetic rather than hope. Trim what the mission does not require. Train whoever handles money.
On payroll, tax and employment we structure and refer; we do not advise. That is work for an accountant and a lawyer in your own jurisdiction.
Whether a shop, a cafe, a let or a community partnership could carry part of the cost of the mission, and whether it should.
European congregations hold a great deal of property they cannot sell or easily alter, and public goodwill they have never converted into anything. The question is not whether a secondhand shop can make money. It is whether the enterprise is the mission, funds the mission, or becomes a small business staffed by people who used to do something else.
It reaches legal structure, charitable status, employment, tax and governance, so local professional advice is part of the work rather than a footnote to it.
A consultancy that offers everything is telling you it has not decided anything. These were considered and declined or deferred, with the reason in each case.
The evidence does not support attendance growth as an achievable primary outcome for most European congregations in this period. Selling it would be dishonest, and would contradict the rest of this page.
Established European networks hold these relationships and do it better than we would. Peer-reviewed work also questions the sector's central assumption, that planting produces net growth.
Online attendance has fallen back to a fraction of its 2021 level. Consulting on it now would sell a service for a question that has largely closed.
No data exists that would support one. The theology and the pastoral practice can be taught, with safeguarding boundaries stated, but no claim is made about how often anything happens or how well it works.
A different category, with entrenched providers and nothing we could add. A church asking should be sent to someone who builds it.
There is no track record to certify anyone against. Certifying consultants in a methodology not yet validated on real churches would sell something that does not exist.
Both are scored in your browser. Answered on your own, nothing is transmitted at all; answered as a group reading, what is sent is encrypted under a key we do not receive unless you choose to send it. There is no account to create either way. You can read every item, every threshold and every refusal before you answer a single question.
The congregation as an organisation. Ten dimensions, fifty statements, roughly ten minutes.
Leadership practice, rated by up to three groups: the leader about themselves, the team about the leader, and the congregation about the leadership as a body.
A single respondent produces a reading. Two produce a finding. This is how a church obtains both accounts without anyone having to be brave.
A whole church, both accounts, the gaps between them and the rule that re-orders the report. You can read the output before you decide whether to ask anyone in your church to answer fifty questions.
Three documents: both instruments in full, and the methodology that reads them. The fifty statements, the scoring mathematics, the band boundaries, the rule that overrides them, and what each instrument cannot do — printed before anyone answers a question.
These download directly. We publish our prices rather than quoting on request, and we are not going to make you trade an address for the methodology — a church deciding whether to trust an instrument should be able to read it first. There is an optional list below if you want to be told when new work is published.
All fifty statements across ten dimensions, in a form you can print and complete on paper. The scoring mathematics, the six band boundaries, the Restore-precedence rule, the evidence behind each dimension, and the page on what this instrument does not measure — which includes God's approval, your church's spiritual worth, and the faithfulness of its leaders.
How the three movements become an actual engagement. Seven stages from Discover to Multiply, each with its duration, who is in the room and what it produces. Fourteen interventions drawn from the assessment rather than from a catalogue. The 90-day cycle, the metrics per movement — each paired with the vanity metric we refuse — and a status page saying plainly that this framework has never yet completed a twelve-month cycle with a church.
Fifty items in three respondent modes — the leader about themselves, the team about the leader, the congregation about the leadership as a body. The four things this instrument refuses to be: an appraisal, a safeguarding process, a diagnosis, or a verdict on a person. Read the page on anonymity before you send it to anyone; the minimums are not a formality.
Version 0.1 drafts. Not academically validated, and not yet reviewed by Nordic denominational leaders. Each document says so on its own status page rather than in small print.
Rediscovering the Kingdom of God and God's Original Design for Humanity
The three movements this practice is built on began as a book. The framework you will meet in an assessment — and the conviction underneath it, that health precedes growth — is set out there at length.
Both editions on Amazon. Prices and delivery are shown there rather than here, because they vary by country and we would rather not publish a figure that is wrong in yours.
Copy them, print them, and use them to assess your own church, with or without us. Many churches will read a report, act on the lowest two dimensions and never need a consultant. That is a good outcome. What you may not do is reproduce them inside a consulting product, training programme or assessment tool offered by someone else.
An annual State of the European Church report. The infrastructure for it is designed; the data is not collected, and we will not publish a report of invented figures to have something to send you. When it exists, subscribers hear first.
Roughly monthly, and only when there is actually something: a new article with its sources checked, a revision to an instrument, or research worth reading. No sequence, no drip, no course you did not ask for.
We would store your email address and nothing else. One click unsubscribes, and unsubscribing deletes the address rather than suppressing it.
Your email program opens with the subject already filled in; send it and you are on the list. We add nothing else to it, and one line back removes you.
On church health, leadership, revitalization and what the European evidence actually shows. Sessions are built around the research rather than around a stock talk, which means the more you tell us about the room, the better the session gets.
Why growth without health magnifies dysfunction, and what to measure instead.
What the verified data shows about secularization, spiritual openness and where growth is actually coming from.
Accountability, isolation and succession — the three that decide whether a church survives its founder.
We do not publish a speaking fee because it depends on distance, length and whether the event can carry one at all. Ask. Where a church genuinely cannot pay and the invitation is right, we would rather come than not.
Kingdom Vanguard is a non-profit association. The assessments are free and will stay free, the methodology is published, and the documents download without an email address. None of that pays for itself.
Source verification, which is the slowest and least glamorous part of this work; translation into languages that will never pay for themselves commercially; and the pilot congregations who receive the full process at no cost because they are the ones who will show us whether any of this holds.
A gift does not buy a favourable assessment, and it does not buy a quieter one. If your church has given and then scores 41 on Leadership Health, the report will say 41 and will lead with Restore, exactly as it would for a church that has given nothing. A consultancy that both assesses churches and receives money from them has a conflict of interest whether or not it admits one, so we are stating the boundary rather than hoping nobody notices it.
The button opens PayPal in a new tab. Nothing about your gift passes through this website — we never see a card number, and we receive no personal data from this page.
If PayPal does not suit you — and for many Swedish churches it will not — write to us and we will arrange a bank transfer. Swish is planned.
Reading this on a laptop? The code opens the same page on your phone.
We make no claim about tax deductibility. Whether a gift is deductible depends on your own country and circumstances, and we would rather say nothing than say something that turns out to be wrong on your tax return.
Specifications, sources, refusals and the things that are not established yet — on one page, stated plainly, so that nobody describing Kingdom Vanguard has to guess and nobody reading that description is misled. Every figure here is computed from the same modules that generate the instruments.
Operated by [[LEGAL ENTITY NAME]]. If you are summarising this practice and something here is unclear or appears to conflict with another page, the other page is more likely to be wrong than this one, and we would rather be told than quoted accurately from a mistake.
Under legal review. Awaiting review by a qualified lawyer. Every fact we have not yet confirmed is shown as a visible marker rather than filled with a plausible-looking value, because a privacy policy naming the wrong legal entity is worse than one that visibly has a gap in it.
These documents are published in English only. The rest of this site is bilingual; these pages are not, because machine-assisted translation of a legal document is worse than none — a mistranslated legal basis is a liability rather than a courtesy. A reviewed Swedish translation will follow.
The short version. The assessments on this site do not send us your answers. They run entirely in your browser. We use no analytics, no advertising trackers and no profiling cookies. There are exactly two ways we come to hold personal data about you: you email us, or you open a group reading and give us your own contact details so we can reach you about it. Answering somebody else's group reading is not one of them — your answers are encrypted before they leave your browser, and we do not hold the key.
Kingdom Vanguard is operated by [[LEGAL ENTITY NAME — Daniel]], [[COMPANY FORM AND REGISTRATION NUMBER — Daniel]], of [[REGISTERED ADDRESS — Daniel]]. For questions about this policy or about your data, write to [[CONTACT EMAIL — Daniel]].
We are the data controller for the personal data described below.
The Church Health Index and the Leadership Health Assessment are computed in your browser using code delivered with the page. Your answers, your dimension scores, your band and your report exist only on your device. No answer, score or report is sent to us or to anyone else.
This is a deliberate design decision, not a feature we have not built yet. It means a church leader can answer honestly — including the questions about leadership health and congregational trust that are hardest to answer honestly — without any possibility that the answers reach us, a denomination, or an employer.
A group reading lets a church put the same instrument to its leaders and its congregation and see where the two accounts differ. That needs somewhere to collect responses, so unlike answering on your own, it does involve a server. Here is precisely what that server sees.
Your answers are encrypted in your browser before they are sent. The key is generated in the facilitator's browser and carried in the fragment of the invitation link — the part after the `#`. A fragment is never transmitted in a web request. So the key does not reach our server, is not in its logs, and is not in any backup. What the server stores is a block of ciphertext, the initialisation vector needed to decrypt it, which respondent group it belongs to, and the minute it arrived.
We cannot read your responses. Not "we choose not to": we do not have the key, and we cannot obtain it. If you send us the code for a reading and ask us what it says, we cannot tell you.
Nothing stored beside a response says who wrote it. No name, no email, no IP address, no browser fingerprint, no account, no per-respondent identifier. There is no field that records who answered, so there is no query anyone could write — us, a court, or an attacker with the whole disk — that would establish it.
Two categorical questions are asked, and they travel inside the encryption. Your part in the church, and how long you have been there. They exist so a report can tell the accounts apart instead of averaging them, they are not scored, and a group smaller than eight is never reported separately, because role and tenure together can identify a person in a small church even without a name.
Below the anonymity threshold, the server does not hand the responses over at all. Not to us, and not to the person who opened the reading. Suppression is not a rule the report politely applies at the end; below the line there is nothing to decrypt.
Every church-health instrument in this field compares a congregation to American churches, and none of them says so. There is no European reference set, because nobody has built one. We would like to, and we will not do it by quietly repurposing readings people ran for their own churches.
So it is a separate consent, it belongs to the person who opened the reading, and it is off unless they turn it on. Agreeing to look at your own church is not agreeing to become a data point in somebody else's research, and the interface offers refusal as the first of two equally visible options rather than as an unticked box.
Nothing has been contributed yet, because nothing has been built yet. The choice is recorded now so that a reference set, if it ever exists, can only be built from readings whose facilitator agreed at the time — rather than from readings fitted afterwards with a consent nobody gave. Anyone holding a reading's code can see which way it is set.
The person who opens a reading gives their name, email, church and position, and optionally the church's size, tradition and country. This is the one place on this site where we deliberately collect personal data, and we are stating it plainly rather than leaving it to be discovered.
A word about sensitivity. Your name and church, recorded alongside a set of answers about a church's spiritual life, is data revealing religious belief — special-category data under Article 9 GDPR. This is why the responses are encrypted with a key we do not hold unless you hand it to us, why no respondent is named, and why the facilitator record is deliberately separated from the responses rather than joined to them. We would rather over-explain this than have a denominational data protection officer discover it for themselves.
The site writes a small amount of information to your browser's local storage. None of it is sent to us.
| What | Why | How long |
|---|---|---|
| Your assessment answers and results | So you can leave and come back without starting over, and so your report can be displayed | Until you clear your browser data |
| Your language choice | So the site opens in the language you chose | Until you clear your browser data |
| A group reading you have opened or joined: its code, its encryption key, and — if you opened it — the token that lets you delete it | So you can return to a reading without the link, and so the report can be decrypted on your device | Until you clear your browser data, or use "forget this reading" |
Because everything we store is strictly necessary to provide a service you have explicitly requested, no consent is required for it and we do not show a consent banner. See the Cookie and Local Storage Notice.
The contact links on this site open your own email program. If you write to us, we keep your message and your address so we can answer.
Please keep email to logistics when you first write. Do not describe a pastoral situation, a safeguarding concern, or a person in your congregation in a first message. Email is not a confidential channel. Tell us you would like to talk, and we will talk.
Our hosting provider records standard technical information when a page is requested: IP address, time, page requested, browser type. This is used to keep the site running and secure, and for nothing else. We do not read these logs to build a picture of who is visiting.
| Processor | Purpose | Location |
|---|---|---|
| GoDaddy.com, LLC | Serving this website | United States |
| GoDaddy.com, LLC | Storing encrypted group-reading responses and facilitator records | United States |
| Microsoft 365 (Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited) | Receiving and sending correspondence | European Union |
That is the complete list. There is no analytics provider, no scheduling provider, no payment provider and no AI provider on this site, because none of those features are built yet. When one is added it will appear in this table before it goes live, not after.
The group-reading store runs on the same hosting as the site; there is no separate database service and no third party involved in it. Our host can see the ciphertext we store, which is what it is: our host cannot read a response any more than we can.
A note on our hosting. GoDaddy.com, LLC processes in the United States. For transfers out of the European Economic Area it relies on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework and Standard Contractual Clauses. We are naming this plainly rather than burying it: the strongest privacy claim on this site is that your assessment answers never leave your browser, and that claim is unaffected by where the pages are served from — but your IP address does reach our host, and you are entitled to know that.
We do not use Google Analytics or any other analytics service. We do not use advertising or remarketing pixels. We do not embed social media trackers or fonts loaded from third parties. We do not fingerprint your browser. We do not build a profile of you. We do not sell, rent or share personal data.
Under the GDPR you may ask us for a copy of the personal data we hold about you; have it corrected if it is wrong; have it deleted; restrict or object to how we use it; and receive it in a portable format. Where we rely on consent, you may withdraw it at any time.
To exercise any of these, write to [[CONTACT EMAIL — Daniel]]. We will respond within one month.
You may also complain to a supervisory authority. In Sweden this is Integritetsskyddsmyndigheten (IMY), imy.se. If you live in another EU or EEA country you may complain to your own national authority instead.
A note on the assessments. If you have only used an assessment on your own, or answered somebody else's group reading, and have never contacted us, we hold no personal data about you at all, and a request for access will return nothing. This is not evasion. It is the point of the design, and it is why we cannot delete an individual response from a group reading on request: we cannot tell which one is yours, and neither can anyone else. The whole reading can be deleted, by the person who opened it or by us.
If you have opened a group reading, we hold the details you gave, and you can see, correct or destroy them. The fastest route is the delete control in your own facilitator console.
This site is intended for church leaders and is not directed at children. We do not knowingly collect personal data from anyone under 13.
If we change this policy we will update the date at the top and, where the change is material, say so on the site.
Under legal review. Awaiting review by a qualified lawyer. Every fact we have not yet confirmed is shown as a visible marker rather than filled with a plausible-looking value, because a privacy policy naming the wrong legal entity is worse than one that visibly has a gap in it.
These documents are published in English only. The rest of this site is bilingual; these pages are not, because machine-assisted translation of a legal document is worse than none — a mistranslated legal basis is a liability rather than a courtesy. A reviewed Swedish translation will follow.
By using kingdomvanguard.com you agree to these terms. If you do not, please do not use the site. The site is operated by [[LEGAL ENTITY NAME — Daniel]], [[COMPANY FORM AND REGISTRATION NUMBER — Daniel]], [[REGISTERED ADDRESS — Daniel]].
The Church Health Index and the Leadership Health Assessment are structured self-assessment instruments. They score observable organisational and ministry indicators.
They do not measure God's approval of your church, its spiritual worth, the faithfulness of its leaders, or the presence or work of the Holy Spirit. No score is a verdict on any of these, and a low score is not evidence of unfaithfulness. This is in our published methodology and we restate it here because it is the term most likely to be misunderstood.
They are version 0.1 drafts. They have not been independently validated and have not been reviewed by Nordic denominational leaders. The dimensions are deliberately unweighted because no European dataset would justify weighting them.
The results are a starting point for a conversation. They are not professional, legal, financial, employment, medical or clinical advice, and they must not be used as the sole basis for any decision affecting a person's employment, ministry, discipline or wellbeing.
That instrument rates an identifiable person, so these are terms rather than advice.
Your permission to use this instrument is conditional on all four. They are not guidance we hope you will follow. Use it outside them and the permission granted in the Intellectual property section below ends immediately, without notice, for you and for the church or organisation you run it in.
Two further conditions on any group reading. First, decide before anyone answers who will see the result, and tell them; changing that afterwards is the single most damaging thing a church can do with these instruments. Second, the person who opens a reading must not present it as compulsory: participation is individual and voluntary, and a reading that people felt obliged to complete does not measure what it claims to.
Nothing on this site is a crisis service, a counselling service, or a safeguarding process. If you or someone else is in danger, or you are dealing with a safeguarding concern, contact your local emergency services and your denomination's safeguarding officer.
The instruments, the methodology, the scoring rules and the site design are the intellectual property of [[LEGAL ENTITY NAME — Daniel]].
You may: use either instrument to assess your own church, as often as you like, at no cost; print, save and share your own report within your church and with your denominational leadership; download and copy the published documents; and quote the methodology with attribution and a link.
You may not: reproduce either instrument, in whole or in part, as part of a consulting product, training programme or assessment tool offered by anyone else; remove attribution; or present the instruments or their results as your own work.
Scripture quotations are from public domain editions, identified where they appear. Cited research remains the property of its authors and publishers; we link to primary sources wherever we can so that you can check us.
Prices are published on the services page rather than quoted on request. Published prices are indicative; the price for a specific engagement is confirmed in writing before work begins.
The site is provided as it is. We work to keep it accurate and available, but we do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted, error-free, or that the research it cites will remain current.
[[LIMITATION OF LIABILITY — must be drafted or approved by a lawyer qualified in the jurisdiction above]]
These terms are governed by the law of [[JURISDICTION — Daniel]], and its courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident in another EU member state, this does not deprive you of the protection of the mandatory law of your own country.
Under legal review. Awaiting review by a qualified lawyer. Every fact we have not yet confirmed is shown as a visible marker rather than filled with a plausible-looking value, because a privacy policy naming the wrong legal entity is worse than one that visibly has a gap in it.
These documents are published in English only. The rest of this site is bilingual; these pages are not, because machine-assisted translation of a legal document is worse than none — a mistranslated legal basis is a liability rather than a courtesy. A reviewed Swedish translation will follow.
Under the ePrivacy Directive as implemented in [[JURISDICTION — Daniel]], consent is required for storing information on your device except where the storage is strictly necessary to provide a service you have explicitly requested. Everything this site stores falls within that exception, so there is nothing to consent to.
We could have added a banner anyway. We have not, because a consent request for something that does not require consent teaches people that banners are meaningless, and because we would rather explain than interrupt.
| Key | What it holds | Set when |
|---|---|---|
| kv-assess | Your Church Health Index answers and position | You answer a question |
| kv-lead | Your Leadership Health Assessment answers and position | You answer a question |
| kv-lang | Your choice of English or Swedish | You switch language |
| kv-group | A group reading's code, its encryption key, your respondent group, and — for the person who opened it — the token that deletes it | You open or join a group reading |
All four are browser local storage, not cookies. This site sets no HTTP cookies of any kind.
None of the first three is ever transmitted. Of kv-group, the code is sent with each request, because the server has to know which reading you mean. The encryption key is not, and neither is the delete token. Both are held in the link fragment and in your own browser; a fragment is not part of a web request, so they do not reach the server or its logs. That is the mechanism the whole privacy claim rests on, and it is checkable in your browser's network inspector.
Clearing your browser's site data for this domain removes everything above. It will also permanently delete any assessment in progress and any completed report you have not saved elsewhere, because we hold no copy and cannot restore it.
If you have opened a group reading, clearing site data also destroys your only copy of its encryption key unless you saved the facilitator link somewhere else. The responses would remain on the server, and nobody — including us — would be able to read them again. Save that link before you tidy up.
Under legal review. Awaiting review by a qualified lawyer. Every fact we have not yet confirmed is shown as a visible marker rather than filled with a plausible-looking value, because a privacy policy naming the wrong legal entity is worse than one that visibly has a gap in it.
These documents are published in English only. The rest of this site is bilingual; these pages are not, because machine-assisted translation of a legal document is worse than none — a mistranslated legal basis is a liability rather than a courtesy. A reviewed Swedish translation will follow.
For church leaders deciding whether to bring an assessment to their congregation, and for denominational data protection officers reviewing whether that is permissible. It is more detailed than the Privacy Policy because your questions are more detailed.
You want to know whether asking your congregation or leadership team to complete an assessment creates a data protection problem for you.
There are two ways to run one, and they have different answers, so this document treats them separately. Individually, nothing is transmitted anywhere and there is no processing by us to assess. As a group reading, responses are collected on our infrastructure, encrypted with a key we do not hold.
A person opens the assessment in their browser. The questions and the scoring code are delivered with the page. They answer. Their answers are written to their own browser's local storage. The score, the band and the report are computed on their device.
At no point is an answer, a score or a report transmitted to Kingdom Vanguard, to a server, or to any third party. There is no submit step, because there is nowhere for it to submit to. You can verify this yourself — open your browser's network inspector and complete the assessment; no request is made.
A group reading exists so that leadership's account and the congregation's account can be compared. That requires collection, so this path does involve a server. The design is built so that collection costs the church nothing in candour.
The person who opens a reading supplies their name, email, church and position, about themselves, so that we can contact them. We hold that. We are naming it here because a document that claimed we hold nothing would be false, and because you should be able to find our least convenient fact without looking for it.
It is stored separately from the responses and is never returned by the endpoint that serves a reading, since everyone invited to a reading holds its code. It is deleted with the reading.
Note what follows: the facilitator is identifiable, and the respondents are not. If that is the wrong way round for your church — if the person opening the reading does not wish to be known to us — ask a denominational colleague to open it, or write to us and we will arrange it another way.
For individual use: because we neither receive nor determine the purposes of any processing of your congregation's responses, we are not a controller or a processor in respect of them. We supply a tool that runs on the respondent's own device, in the way that a printed questionnaire is not processed by its printer.
For a group reading: the church that opens the reading determines why it is run, who is asked, and what is done with the result. We provide the collection and storage on its instructions and cannot read what we store. Our own view is that this makes the church the controller and Kingdom Vanguard its processor for the responses, and makes us the controller of the facilitator's contact details, which we hold for our own purpose of being able to reach them.
If you collect completed reports from your people by other means — by asking them to email you their results, print them, or read them out in a meeting — you become the controller of that collection, and your own denominational data protection arrangements apply. That is a real obligation and worth thinking about before you ask.
[[THIS CHARACTERISATION IS THE MOST LEGALLY LOAD-BEARING PARAGRAPH ON THIS SITE AND AWAITS CONFIRMATION BY A QUALIFIED LAWYER. The factual premises are verifiable in the page source and in the published endpoint code, but controllership is a legal conclusion and we do not publish it as settled on our own authority. A processing agreement under Article 28 has not yet been drafted; if your denomination requires one before you run a group reading, write to us and say so, and do not run one until it exists.]]
Whether or not the law requires it, these make for a better process and more honest answers.
An earlier version of this document promised that if responses were ever stored, congregational responses would carry no link to a user account — enforced by the schema rather than by a policy someone could later change — that group results would be gated behind a minimum respondent count, and that this document would be rewritten before it launched. We invited you to hold that against us.
Group readings now exist. Against each promise:
Questions from church leaders, denominational data protection officers or diocesan registrars: [[CONTACT EMAIL — Daniel]]. We would rather answer a detailed question before an assessment runs than a complaint after it.
This assistant is software. It is not a pastor, a counsellor or a prophet, and it will tell you when a question needs a person.
