Spiritual Development Insights

This summer a seminary student interned with me and we did some work exploring what spiritual development looks like at Hillcrest. We conducted a survey (that several people responded to), held a focus group meeting as a follow up to the survey, and interviewed several of Hillcrest's small group and bible study leaders to get their input on what they see happening in terms of spiritual development at Hillcrest. We made a presentation to our Leadership Council last night that detailed some of our findings, and over the next couple of days, I'd like to share some of the results on the blog. While Hillcresters will be most interested in what we discovered, there might be crossover to those from other churches as well.

So for today, here's the raw data from the online survey:
• Time spent in spiritual practices
o 38% spend an hour or so per week
o 27% spend more than two hours per week
o 24% spend two hours per week
o 12% spend less than hour per week
• Hours spent serving others in the last month
o 47% spent more than 6 hours
o 21% spent 3-4 hours
o 15% spent 1-2 hours
o 15% spent 5-6 hours
o 3% spent none
• Quality of close personal relationships
o 35% have shown great strength and healing
o 35% have shown small amounts of progress
o 24% have the same amount of conflict and stress
o 3% have more conflict and stress
• Health of personal finances
o 35% made excellent progress
o 35% made some progress
o 18% made no progress
o 3% went backwards
• Involvement in mentoring relationships
o 62% are not in a mentoring relationship
o 35% are in a mentoring relationship

We'll attempt to explain what these numbers might mean tomorrow.