What church doesn’t want more visitors?

I’ve never met one that doesn’t.

What I have encountered is churches trying to get an understanding of what it means to see an appropriate amount of visitors. For some, they are in so much anxiety over growth they can’t even begin to think about it. It might even be a point of argument when leadership meets. If the conversation stays in an emotional zone, you will never be able to start to understand where to begin.

Also, in many of these situations, there are a significant amount of unengaged adults who are already part of the larger life of the local church. There is a growth engine in that realm as well.

In this email, I want to talk about that and hopefully begin to eliminate some of the stress involved.

I’m a big fan of objective metrics. Let’s unpack that idea.

Let me do it in two layers; objectivity and metrics. I find this is the best way to start de-tangling any anxiety over growth. Clarity is always a powerful thing and the first step in objectivity is always clarity.

Smaller churches, and churches in certain traditions love to live in subjectivity. It’s about what feels nice or brings up great memories. These memories can be great, but often enough, there is some objective reality behind them. Even if we go back decades into their ministry, we can find solid lines of participation and engagement. That’s why I love data. Even when we aren’t being intentional, patterns can be discerned if the data is kept.

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Back in the previous era of the church, the subjective assumption was Folks, participate in a local church.

Now, we don’t have that subjective assumption, and the first step towards understanding any growth is getting objective about it!

Think about anything you do in life. What is intentional usually is what matters. Think about getting healthy. Many times, the first thing a doctor or trainer will have you do is start tracking your eating and exercise. Whatever you are naturally (subjectively) doing is what got you to where you currently are.

To fix the health problem, you have to start doing intentional things. This is where metrics come into objectivity. We want to track the things we are working on improving.

So let’s talk about how objective metrics can help understand visitors and growth.

A couple of data points we will build from.

What percentage of your average attendance in worship is first-time guests?

I’ll just drop in the section from "The Surprising Return of the Neighborhood Church" for you. We will build on this idea below.

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Tracking Engagement.

You want your local people to be engaged in the church. Again, not in subjective ways, but in objective and meaningful ways. I love Junius Dotson’s book “Developing an Intentional Discipleship System”. This is a short book, but helps any leader understand the intentionality not just behind engagement, but making disciples.

Churches need to be seeing 50% rates in discipleship and missions/serving to be ahead of the curve. You also need to have at least 80% of your AWA as a giving unit to get any sort of financial stability.

Now the metrics.

One of the reasons I like metrics is they relieve anxiety. I’ve compared understanding growth in a normal-sized church to playing Calvinball. You know, the 90’s comic book series about the boy who could talk with his stuffed tiger?

Calvinball was a game they played. It seemed to have no rules, but only one. If you have the ball, you can make the rules. You can change the game, the playing field, the way to score, all of it. For smaller churches, or churches struggling with sustainability, any growth conversation feels like playing Calvinball.

Metrics stop Calvinball.

Here is a list of how they fix it.

Metrics help create a growth goal.

I wrote last year about the framework of missional saturation. Simply put, it is the percentage of your mission field who is part of your worship service on a Sunday. In a town of 5000, and you worship 50, you have a missional saturation of 1%. 50 ÷ 5000 = .01. Move the decimal over and you get 1%.

If your church isn’t struggling, that 1% is working for you. Don’t think you don’t need to grow, but you are in a different place.

However, if you are struggling and you know you need more people, growth changes (see my article on “the church that has to grow or dies”). So you figure out your missional saturation, and then use the same idea to understand what an initial goal might be.

”We want to be at 1.5%, or 75 people."

That means 25 new folks or around 7-8 families. Rarely does an entire family decide to start attending a church at the same time. Usually, I’d say it is a decision curiosity from one of the adults. This means reaching that one curious and open adult is what matters.

Using missional saturation we’ve gone from “We have to grow or we die” (#calvinball) to understanding the local church wants to reach and engage 7-8 adults, leading to an increase in 25 people.

My friends, that isn’t an anxious game. It’s a strategic one. You’ve set an objective, and now you get to build out the strategy and tactics to do it.

Is more of your church engaged or disengaged?

The last church I served was around 18 people on Sunday morning. But if I looked at our giving information, attendance at other functions, and who helped with mission projects, as well as those adults who only came to worship once every 6 weeks or so, I knew the church was around 45 active adults.

That’s a difference of 150%!

You’ve heard me say it before, your church is probably larger than you think it is.

If you want to lessen that gap, the good thing is you will have to do the things you would also have to do to keep new people and engage them.

Again, I go back to percentage goals.

Say you are a church of 18, but only 8 people are involved in discipleship. That means 40% of the average worship attendance comes to discipleship. Let’s keep on playing the game with my former church's number. 45 adults with 8 coming to discipleship. That gives us 18%.

So you decide to set a goal of 30% (compared to the 45 adults). 14 people in discipleship. We’ve got our objective.

What would it take to increase discipleship attendance by 6 people?

That’s the strategy you build. For this small of a number, and if the church isn’t that intentional anyway, the tactics are pretty easy.

• Communication about events.
• Personal Invitation.
• Adding a time slot that works for the population that doesn’t come.

Take a couple of months and track how many visitors you have and compare that to the average worship attendance.

Take the time to get a baseline. Or, you might have these records already (please keep up with this sort of thing anyway!). Say you are a church of 60 on Sunday. You only had 2 visitors in the last month. This means your monthly visitor percentage was 3.3%. Honestly, that isn’t bad. Did those visitors come back?

Tyler Smith, in his book Boomerang, says only 10-16% of visitors come back for a second visit.

If they did, congrats on breaking the curve! In that scenario I would set a goal to be at 3.3% each Sunday…meaning you would have a monthly average of 13.3%. That is solid!

By now, you know the drill. Name the objective, design a strategy, and develop and work the tactics.

So stop playing Calvinball. Realize that objective metrics can help you build up a path towards greater engagement AND a better welcoming and integration of visitors.

Chad​
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Are Visitors To Your Church Staying? 🎬 How often does a visitor return for a 2nd visit? In this video, I unpack a basic integration system and show how I use Trello to manage new visitors to your church. Watch the Video