Let’s face it. While email promised to make our lives so much easier, most of us find ourselves buried under a mountain of the stuff. If you take a look at our inboxes you will find hundreds if not thousands of messages clogging up our lives. The scary thing is that once a message has …
Studies have shown that only 1 out of 5 North American church members invited anyone to church last year. Only 1 in 50 invited someone who doesn’t already attend another church. This means that, on a yearly basis, 80% of the time we don’t invite anyone, and if we do, 90% of the time it …
The Laws of Outreach – Part 5: Equipping Your People to be Inviters Read More »
Once you have attracted visitors to your church, the next step is to have them connect. If visitors never end up joining your church, your outreach efforts have been in vain. Oddly enough, most churches never really think through this process and, as a result, never get many people to stay. The first thing to …
Once a church has discovered their identity and ensured that their image now lines up with it, the next step is to communicate that image to the community. To be sure, the community already has an image of you in mind, it just might not be the right one. It might take a significant amount …
The Laws of Outreach – Part 3: Attracting Visitors Read More »
Once a church has decided in earnest that they want to be faithful to the commission Christ has given them and reach out to those beyond the church walls they should spend a good deal of effort on the first stage of the process: building an outreach identity. Before you can invite someone you have …
The Laws of Outreach – Part 2: Building an Outreach Identity Read More »
According to George Barna, 75 churches close their doors every week. While Christianity is experiencing explosive growth in most areas of the world, North America is the most notable exception. While part of the problem may be our theology (if evangelicals are in decline, mainline churches are in a free-fall), the bulk of our problem …
The Laws of Outreach – Part 1: The Problem We Face Read More »
There is an old story told of how you can throw a frog into a kettle of hot water and it will immediately jump out, but if you put that same frog into a kettle of cool water and turn up the heat slowly the frog won’t notice anything is wrong until it’s too late. …
Part of the problem we face as church leaders is that we fail to see things through the eyes of our first-time visitors. When we put ourselves in their shoes and understand their discomfort we will be able to help them much more. #1 – Finding Out When Church Starts Assuming that a visitor knows …
The most common reason why high quality churches still aren’t growing is that they are physically full and don’t know it. Part of the problem is that everybody over-estimates the size of their sanctuary – and I mean everybody. Big churches, small churches, city churches, and town churches all overestimate their seating capacity. There are …
6 Reasons Your Sanctuary is Smaller Than You Think Read More »
There are many incremental barriers to church growth – problems that add up over time to drive people away. Examples include a poor sound system, out-dated decor, dirty restrooms, lack of needed programing, poor preaching, etc. These are things that, by themselves, will merely slow growth down, but won’t start to kill your church unless …
2 Absolute Barriers to Church Growth and Why You’re Unaware of Them Read More »
