Cracking Your Congregation's Code: Mapping Your Spiritual DNA to Create Your Future

Concise, easy to read, easy to understand. A good read for any pastor or church leader who wants to get some clarity on the strengths and uniqueness of his or her congregation. The REALLY good news is that this is NOT another "How I Did It" book. To be sure, "How I Did It" books are inspiring, and you can pick up a lot of good tips and tricks. The trouble is that most of them probably won't work in YOUR situation! What Southern & Norton have done is given us a method which will help us understand and analyze our own unique settings - to discover our own congregation's values and unique giftedness - so that we can focus on doing the things that are right for us, not for somebody else! Share this one with key leaders in your congregation!

My congregation worked with Southern and Norton over the course of several months. We found their strategy for church growth and renewal to be easy to follow, highly participatory, and full of wisdom. It has totally transformed our congregation and organizational systems!"Cracking Your Congregation's Code" is a great contribution to the church growth movement! It not only offers a theoretical framework for congregational health and vitality, but provides easy to use surveys and inventories. Their recommendations for church growth and renewal are not "one size fits all" but are easily tailored for each congregation's unique "DNA". The end result is the development of a "strategic map" that will guide one's congregation to a new place of enthusiasm and growth!

I've been implementing some of the procedures in Cracking Your Congregation's Code, and I've found it answers many basic needs of busy pastors and lay leaders. I know it helps answer mine. It's a practical book, that's easy to read, and easy to use. It describes how a church can transform itself. The surveys the authors provide for the four congregational systems give a church a way to quickly evaluate and strengthen their work. From my standpoint, as someone looking for how-to's, I'd say the information in chapter seven on how to create a strategic map is worth the price of the book alone.

I'm a priest at an Episcopal church in San Francisco, in charge of congregational development. For the last 16 months, I've used the principles in Cracking Your Congregation's Code to organize our parish's approach to growth.We are delighted with the results we're getting. More than 25 members are fully engaged in the growth process (about one in five of our active parishioners) and there's an almost palpable, growing enthusiasm for the parish's life together. There's a sense that we know where we are going and there's a confidence that we are prepared to make the investment of time, energy and money to get there. Weekly attendance is up about 20% and I expect the upcoming newcomer class to be the largest in three years.I believe that Norton and Southern's approach works for a couple of reasons. First, it has been tested and refined in hundreds of churches, of varying denominations. And second, it creates an environment where growth is coming out of who the congregation really is -- thus helping it through the usually inevitable "we want to grow but don't want to change" resistance. Done properly, the parish can see that growth is emerging from their core, from who they really are, in a healthy way. That keeps the fear of change down to a manageable level so it does what it's supposed to do (keep us careful), rather than cripple the congregation's essential ability to respond flexibly to the demands this new century will place on faith communities.Overall, we have found the process to be exciting, effective, and hope-inspiring. Following it, the entire parish is beign energized and empowered to live through, experience, even thrive on, change in a time when change has never been more important.

As a longtime churchman, and church-goer, I found the book's outline on finding one's spiritual type to be invaluable! In both my wife's and my earlier years we "church-hopped" quite a bit, trying to find our "spiritual types". Had this book existed then--and had we worked the exercise--it would have saved us all kinds of time AND gotten us on the track we finally settled on many years earlier!