Congregational Listening Tools

Tools for understanding the story, culture and calling of your congregation

The Kokerboom Toolkit offers practical resources to help pastors, church councils and congregations listen more carefully to their own life together. Through questions, observation, history, photos, surveys and conversation, these tools help churches notice the gifts, habits, memories and relationships that shape their missional identity.

Do you want to better understand your congregation or community of faith? Inspired by the work of our research team, the Studying Congregations Toolkit is a series of easy to use PDF downloads. Explore the individual tools below. Share them with other students, theological educators and religious leaders.

Where To Look

No matter where your congregation keeps its records, your first step is deciding what information will best help you answer the main questions you are exploring. For example, if you are exploring the changing sources of and demands on the resources of the group, budgets and annual reports are a logical place to look. Decide on a few key indicators (total income from pledges, for instance, or spending on property and maintenance, mission gifts, denominational assessments). Then track down those figures for the time period you’ve decided is important, put them in a spreadsheet, and recruit someone with skills in working with numbers to produce a report, with a graph that clearly communicates the trends. Looking at budget records in this way can help you see the important values of the community.

Toolkit Resources