Stories of Transformation: A Church Pursues Its Passion for Community

Assessment helped Mountain Vista Bible Church pursue its passion for community.

When interim pastor and church consultant Lavern “Bud” Brown was leading Mountain Vista Bible Church through a time of transition, he decided it was the best time to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the congregation.

As an experienced church consultant, Brown is familiar with a number of church assessment tools, but this time, in his work with Mountain Vista, he decided to give the Transformational Church Assessment Tool (TCAT) a try after looking for a tool that gave him clearer insight into the congregation than that afforded by other assessment options.

When Brown led Mountain Vista through TCAT, the church was searching for a new pastor and hoping for a refreshing change.

“It takes a skilled pastor and it takes a willing church to turn a church around and move out of the swamp and into conversion growth,” Brown said. “I was able to infer some willingness to change from some of the scores [on the TCAT] when I correlated that with some of the things I was hearing in the personal interviews I was having with church members.”

Mountain Vista was facing a significant amount of debt and other related challenges when Brown was invited to consult. Not wanting to interfere with his consulting work, Brown reluctantly agreed when the church asked him to become their intentional interim pastor.

After interviewing a number of church members and reviewing some of the church documents, Brown used TCAT as a way to objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of the church members. The assessment enabled him and his team to verify the information already gathered and catch any areas of improvement they may have missed. He found that the objective nature of the TCAT assessment reinforced …