Jorge Rodríguez has been a missionary for the Baptist Convention of Ecuador for a few years and says, "We saw a need to help the Church improve in our denomination." He is his denomination's coordinator for the More Churches and Stronger Churches program with Multiplication Network Ministries (MNM) in the area of Napo Galeras in east Ecuador.

One of the tools he has used to strengthen churches is Take Your Church's Pulse, developed by MNM. The goal of the tool is to create conversations between church members and leadership on how to better serve their community for the Lord.

"Thanks to the partnership we have with MNM, we found this tool and it has been very effective. It is helping to strengthen churches that have recently been planted and others that were planted years ago," Jorge shares.

To encourage churches to use the tool, Jorge has used a strategy of first familiarizing area leaders with the tool so each can motivate their pastors to work with their congregations to see the weak areas that God reveals to them and help them improve them. Under Jorge's leadership, 60 churches have used the tool.

He admits the work was not easy but worth it—"We found a few areas where we were failing in these congregations. In some we saw that the leadership did not know how to communicate the vision of their church and that was because there wasn't a vision! Another important area that was slipping was prayer and churches weren't paying attention to that," Jorge says.

Churches testify to the usefulness of the tool. They use the diagnostics to measure their effectiveness and then implement strategies based on their results. The positive responses have motivated Jorge to create a goal to have more than 500 churches use the tool.