The Building Blocks of Faith Assessment Questionnaire can help you identify faith formation ministry areas that might need changes or adjustments. 

Who should take the Assessment?

Any group you want to collect data from can take the assessment, but as more people participate, a more accurate picture of a congregation emerges. Some options:

• The entire congregation
• Participants in a specific ministry or program
• People in specific age groups

Children can take the Assessment too. Provide assistance if they need help reading or understanding the questions.

Administering the Assessment

• Print out the number of questionnaires you will need (one per person). Each person should fill out only one assessment. It usually takes 10 minutes or less to complete.
• The questionnaire does not ask for the person's name but does ask for general information such as age group, gender, and how long they have attended the church. That info is helpful in identifying patterns and trends, so encourage people to provide it.
• Instruct the group to place a score of 0 (never/rarely), 1 (sometimes) or 2 (most of the time/always) in front of 20 statements regarding their spiritual life. 
• Collect all the completed assessments. 

Where and When 

People can take the Assessment any time that works in your context, such as

• immediately after a worship service before people are dismissed.
• during coffee time.
• during a potluck dinner.
• before and after any ministry changes are made (to see if the changes have been effective).

Organizing the Data

There are a variety of ways to organize the results, but the easiest way is to use a spreadsheet. Here’s a spreadsheet sample that shows how the entered-in results might look. One church held an event at which they administered the Assessment, had a team of people enter the results into a spreadsheet immediately, and shared the results by the time the event ended. 

Interpreting Results

Analyzing the results should be done with care. It can be tempting, for instance, to compare the averages of each of the four subscores (corresponding to the four Building Blocks) to each other and say that one area is stronger than another. But that might not be comparing apples to apples—for example, you wouldn’t want to compare a fledgling, experimental ministry to an established well-oiled-machine ministry. 

Instead of focusing on averages, for each subscore ask questions like these: 

• What is the highest scoring statement?
• What is the lowest scoring statement?
• If the individual scores within this category vary widely, why might that be?
• How do the scores differ among age groups? (Note: Children’s scores may be different from adults’ scores because children may struggle to understand the nuances of the questions.)

We don’t want to overstate what we can learn from this assessment. If the number of people who complete the assessment is small, a couple of scores that are different from most of the others could skew the data, so all of your results should be considered as merely one data point in your thinking about your church’s faith formation efforts.