Growing bigger does not always lead to a healthy church. There are many different factors underlying this whole concept and the BCGA was involved in researching and producing teaching material about this aspect of church growth.
Natural Church Development (NCD) was a concept developed in Germany by Christian Schwarz. He recognised that growing bigger does not always lead to a healthy church and that, within each individual church situation, there were different factors which affected the health of that church. The basis of Schwarz's teaching was that a church's growth was limited by its weaknesses. The NCD programme accessed the strengths of a church and used them to build their weaknesses, thus encouraging growth.
The BCGA were given the rights to translate Schwarz's teaching into English and to develop a full programme that could be used by churches in Britain. They published a number of NCD books, ran training courses for church leaders and advised many individual churches across the country. This aspect of church growth continues to have relevance today and thus we have made available below in digitalised form the NCD material held by our ministry. In addition, archived issues of the BCGA's Natural Church Development Supplement can be viewed here.
