Category Archives: Church Culture

In my last post, I talked about the most important 10 minutes in your church service. First-time guests at your church will usually determine whether to come back for a second visit in the first 10 minutes of arriving on your campus. They will reinforce their decision based on how friendly they find your church. That decision will come in the first 10 minutes after the service has ended.  Remember, people aren’t looking for friendly churches. They’re looking for friends.

Now that we have established a couple of ground rules about people visiting your church, maybe you can do the right things to get them to return for a second visit. You will clean up the lawn and landscaping. You will have friendly people greet them in the parking lot and even inside the church. You will make sure that there are people to greet them after the service ends. Surely that will get them to return! And perhaps you’re right. Those things alone may be enough for a first-time guest to make the decision to return next week and give you a second shot. But what about a 3rd visit? What about stacking the deck so that they are still in your church in 6 months or a year? Or 5? How do you turn guests into regular attenders? Better yet, how do you turn them into involved members?

The short answer is that there isn’t a set of rules to determine these things. If there were, every church in America would be growing, and we know that that just isn’t true. However, we can look at successful, growing churches and examine some of the things which they have done to make them successful. There are some steps that you can take to help push your church in the direction of growth. Keep in mind that it’s not only doing these things that will help your church grow. It’s doing them well.

One of the most important systems that you can put into place is Small Groups. With the rising use of technology, I have often asked pastors the question: Why would people get out of bed on a Sunday morning and come to your church? Why not just stay at home and watch one of the mega-churches on the internet? The answer is usually: community. It isn’t the style of music or the great preaching that will bring people to your church week after week. It’s other people. Not that music and preaching don’t have anything to do with it. They do. But the main thing that will keep people coming back to your church is other people. It’s a sense of community. Of belonging. One of the best ways to promote community in your church is to have small groups. Remember – it’s not just doing small groups. It’s doing them well. Developing your leaders and making sure that they are

One of the best ways to promote community in your church is to have small groups. Remember – it’s not just doing small groups. It’s doing them well. Developing your leaders and making sure that they are facilitating the groups, not just teaching them is important. The main goal of your small groups is connection, not information.

According to a recent Barna survey, when asked to use one word to describe their ideal church, millennials chose the word “Community”. Small groups will also help attract and keep younger people in your church.

During the first 6 months of attending your church, people are asking themselves 3 questions:

1. Can I make friends in this church?
2. Is there a place in this church where I can fit in?
3. Does this church really want me?

In the following 6 months, people are asking a different set of questions:

1. Are my new friends as good as my old ones?
2. Is attending this church worth the cost of being involved?
3. Is my contribution important?

Remember that when people visit your church as first-time guests, they are usually there because of a need in their lives. They are checking to see if your church can meet that need. If it can, they will stick around. But once the need is met, they will continue to attend because of the relationships they have made in your church.

In the end, it will be relationships that keep people in your church. Raise the value and visibility of relationship and your church will grow.

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @RealTomRawlings for more insights into church growth and leadership.

 

Last week, I talked about some of the signs of an unhealthy church. This week, I want to look at one of the aspects of a healthy, growing church. I worked in a number of secular positions prior to becoming involved in ministry. Most recently, I worked in the Customer Service department of a large organization. It was there that I learned one of the secrets to church growth: Customer

Service. Customer Service is not something that we typically associate with churches. When we think of customer service, we usually think about shopping. But when addressing church growth, that is exactly what guests in your church services are doing: shopping for a church. And just like  when shopping for a new vacuum, they want to know that they have made the right choice when making a final decision. After all, which church you attend has a huge impact on your life as a Christian.

So let’s consider for a moment some of the things that a guest in your church might look at when making the decision about whether your church will be “the” church for them. Let’s start with some basic facts.

1. People do not automatically decide to become a part of your church.
2. The responsibility for their decision lies with you, the church. Not with them.
3. The process of membership begins before they ever attend.
4. Church growth is an ongoing process
5. Most churches can improve their customer service.

Most first-time visitors will decide whether they’re coming back during their first visit. Usually, that decision is made at two critical points in the visit.

1. In the first 10 to 12 minutes upon entering your church campus. This critical first impression will have a great impact on whether your guests will return or not. You don’t get a second chance to make a good first impression. With this in mind, it is vital that your parking area is not only well-maintained but also have clear signage and directions about where to park.  If possible, have a section of your parking designated specifically for first- time visitors. This area should be closest to the entrance and be clearly marked. Your campus should be landscaped and clean. The exterior of your building should look like a place that someone who isn’t familiar with your church would want to check out.

Inside, they will meet your people for the first time. Are they greeted when they arrive? Are the greeters friendly, or just creepy? It’s important that your guests be treated just like that: Guests. What do guests who visit your home for the first time need to know? One of the first things that I always want to know is: where is the bathroom?

Guests with children will need to know what they do with them. Do you have clear signage that points them toward the children’s area? Better yet, is there someone who will help them find it? By help, I mean someone who will ask about their children’s ages and names. Someone who will walk the parents and children to the proper area and then introduce them to the teacher of the class? By name. Someone who will escort the parents back to the main seating area and even introduce them to a few people along the way? Don’t treat them like visitors. Treat them like guests. After all, that is really what they are. They are guests in your church. Treat them as you would treat a valued customer in your business. A visitor is a person who comes to inspect, or stay at a place for a short time for a particular purpose. A guest is a person who is welcomed into another person’s home. A person to whom hospitality is extended. A guest is a person held in honor who is due special courtesies.

During this time, they will also be making the determination as to whether your church can meet their needs. Do you have something in place for their children? Their teens? Is there information on the various events readily available? Do you have small groups? Discipleship classes? What topics are being discussed? Is your mid-week service advertised along with the topic currently being explored?

2. The second point at which a decision is made about whether to return to your church is during the closing 10 minutes. What happens during the minutes following the dismissal of service and your congregation heading out the doors for Sunday dinner? Usually, that’s the point at which they all gather with their friends to catch up on what they have missed during the week. At most churches, it becomes a gathering of cliques. Circles of friends gather to chat with each other. There’s nothing wrong with this. In fact, if people rush out the doors as soon as they are dismissed it’s usually a sign of an unhealthy church! But keep in mind your guests. What are they feeling during this time? Left out would probably be an accurate description. What they will remember more than the first 10 minutes will be the last 10. Those will be the memories that are freshest in their mind.

You need to create a culture of inclusiveness in your congregation. This means that they will stay and chat with their friends after the service, but will first be on the lookout for those who are making a beeline for the door. In order for a person to return to your church and eventually call it their home, they should make an average of 7 new friends in the first 30 days of attending. The average number of friends that a guest makes when making the decision not to return to a church is 2 in the first 30 days.

I will follow up on this topic of church growth in the next article. For now, you need to consider the level of customer service in your church. Are you customer friendly? How do your guests feel when leaving your service? Has value been added to their lives because of the 90 minutes that they spent with you?

Be sure to follow me on Twitter @RealTomRawlings for more church growth and leadership ideas.

There is a lot of discussion on how to grow a church. Just do a Google search for “Church Growth” and you will find thousands of resources for church growth strategies or principles. Now, I’m not opposed to growing churches. In fact, I think that most churches want to grow. After all, it only makes sense: larger attendance numbers equates to more people reached with the Gospel, right?

I agree that churches should grow. I’m just not convinced that larger equates to better. I’m also not convinced that attendance should be the only, or even the best, indicator of a healthy church. Sure, reaching more people with the message of Jesus is critical to the survival of the church. But reaching more people through an unhealthy church is not good. That would only add to the number of people who are unhealthy.  We all recognize that not all growth(s) on (or in) your body are good. Even though growth is necessary for our survival. It’s not growth that is necessary. It’s healthy growth.

I think that we sometimes place too much emphasis on how large a church is and not how healthy it is. While I do believe it is possible for unhealthy churches to stimulate growth, I am convinced that a healthy church will grow almost automatically. How can you tell whether your church is healthy or not? Here are some things I think you should look for. These five things should give you an indication of the health of your church:

1. Your church may not be healthy if you are seeing few salvations. The mission of the church is to “Go into all the world and make disciples”. If we’re not making disciples, the health of our church should be questioned. Few salvations could also be an indication that you are not attracting people outside your church.
2. Little or no impact on your community. A question to ask yourself should be “If my church were to disappear tomorrow, would anyone in our community know that it was gone?” The answer to that question should be a resounding “YES!”. We are to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). If the salt remains in the salt shaker, how effective is the salt at flavoring food? Healthy churches will be impacting their community in noticeable ways.
3. Prayer is not at the forefront of the ministry. If we think that we can accomplish the mission of the church without prayer, we are not a healthy church. I’m not talking about praying at home. I’m talking about not only times of corporate prayer but about an emphasis on prayer in the services. We should be encouraging our people to pray for their pastors, leaders, volunteers and their unsaved friends. In fact, I am convinced that a healthy church will not grow without an emphasis on prayer.
4. Serving stems from a sense of duty and not from the realization that service is a basic characteristic of being a disciple of Jesus. I understand that EVERY church has a problem with having enough volunteers. I’m not talking about the quantity of volunteers here, but the quality. If your volunteers are constantly grumbling or complaining about serving, you may have an unhealthy church. Jesus served. Jesus taught that we are to serve. I have worked with churches where the volunteers have complained about not being able to be in the sanctuary enough or complained about the length of the service because it meant that they were stuck serving for over an hour. If your volunteers don’t understand the concept of service, it may be a sign that your church is unhealthy.
5. No one is challenged to become better. In a healthy church, people are challenged to make changes in their lives to become more Christ-like. The old adage is true: “If you keep doing what you are doing, you will continue to get what you are getting”. In a healthy church, people should be challenged to make the necessary changes in their lives that will result in them becoming more like Christ. If the sermons are “feel good” messages and there is no clear path to discipleship, you may be part of an unhealthy church.

Of course, I could list several more. This is by no means an all-inclusive list. These are just some of the observations I have found to be true in my experience. What would you add to the list?

Don’t forget to follow me on twitter @RealTomRawlings for more insight on church growth and leadership.

In this post on some of the shifts taking place in the American Church, I want to tie into some of what I posted last week. In my last post, I discussed the shift taking place in church attendance. One of the factors in that shift has its roots in technology. This brings us to a shift in the focus of the church. People are attending church less often because they don’t see the benefit of attending. And often times, there isn’t any real benefit in church attendance.  Why would I get out of bed on a Sunday morning, get dressed and go to a local church if I can sit at home in my pajamas and watch some great worship, preaching or teaching on my TV, computer or phone? This brings up the shift that is taking place in churches by necessity. The experience of attending a local church must be greater than just the content alone.

Great content can be found anywhere on the web. So in order to continue attracting people to our churches, we must make the experience greater than simply great music and an engaging sermon. There must be something else. Something that answers the question for you: Why would anyone want to come to my church? As we discussed last week, it is simply not enough to expect that all Christians will come to church weekly. That mindset has shifted in our culture. We need more than just an expectation that people’s sense of Christian duty will drive them to our churches week after week. What are some of the things that will attract and keep more people?

1. A sense of something bigger. People – and especially younger people – feel a need to be a part of something bigger than themselves. People don’t need more entertainment. They can find entertainment more now than at any other time in history. They don’t need to be entertained in church. They need a sense of God. People can find great content online, but they can feel like they are a part of something greater than themselves spiritually only through attending a local church. The church as a whole is shifting toward a more focused sense of mission as opposed to vision. Knowing why you exist is becoming more important that the methods by which you carry out that mission.
2. Community. People can enjoy great content online, but they don’t get a sense of community by streaming a service from a church on the other side of the country. Even younger people who have grown up with technology and who have a different definition of “community” than us older folks, want real, genuine community. The trend of multi-site churches has reinforced the idea that people actually want smaller, more intimate settings for church. If you want more people in your church, you need to place more emphasis on things like small groups, discipleship classes, and ministries that cater to specific needs, such as single parenting, marriage, and finances. If we’re talking about attracting more young people to the church, the most positive church experiences among millennials are relational.
3. An opportunity to serve. One of the things that you absolutely cannot do by streaming church on Sunday is to be actively involved in the mission of the local church. You can only do that through attendance. Depending on the level of involvement, you may even be required to attend more often than you normally would. The key to active involvement though is not simply plugging bodies into positions. That may actually lead to less attendance. The key is to find people’s passion and plug them in where their passion lies. To do this may require some up-front work on the part of the church, but it is well worth the investment of time and, in some cases, a little money. At our church, we use three tools to help us identify passion. We use StrengthsFinder to help us identify natural talent and abilities, and we use the True Colors personality test to help us identify personality types. We also use the Saddleback Spiritual Gifts test to help identify spiritual gifting. I am not involved in any way with these products. I am just giving you the tools that we use. They may or may not be suitable for your use. Once we have identified a person’s natural abilities, their spiritual giftings, and their personality types, it becomes much easier to plug them into a ministry that they will enjoy being a part of. If they enjoy doing something, chances are that they will burn out less often, show up more often, and be better equipped to do the work of the ministry than if we had just plugged a ministry hole with a body.

Of course, there are many other factors that affect a dwindling frequency of church attendance. Quality child care, friendliness of current members, and relevance of not just the message, but the overall experience to their lives. As the baby boomers age out, a younger generation shifts into place in our churches, as it did when our parents grew older. While THE church will always survive, if individual churches are to survive. there must be some further, intentional shifting toward this younger generation. I’ll address that in my next post.

Remember to follow me on twitter (@RealTomRawlings) for more leadership and church growth posts as well as more trending ideas.

 

In my last post, I talked about the shift toward multi-site churches that has occurred over the past decade or so. This shift has been so subtle and also has met with such little resistance that it has become commonplace today without many people even realizing it.

One of the other shifts that has occurred in recent years has to do with church attendance. As I mentioned in a previous post, I grew up as a pastor’s son. When we said went to church, we went to church. In fact, when I was a kid, our Wednesday night attendance was nearly that of our Sunday morning and Sunday night attendance. If the doors of the church were open, we went to church. It was the same for our small community. Attending church regularly meant that you were there every Sunday morning, at least 3 out of 4 Sunday nights and no less than 2 out of 4 Wednesday evening services each month.

Going to church was just one of those things you did if you were a Christian. Even as I got older and had a choice about whether to go to church, I went.  I didn’t have many friends in school. All of my best friends went to church with me. It may not have been the right motivation, but I went to church to see my friends.  We had the same ushers every week. The same person taught our Sunday School class each week. The pianist and organist were there every week. At every service!

But if we look at statistics for church attendance today, we will see that church attendance has been steadily declining over the past decade or so. Yet, despite the decline in attendance, nearly 80% of people self-identify as Christians. Where is the disconnect? It’s in the frequency that people attend. Where everyone went to church every week in the 50’s, 60’s and even the 70’s, the frequency with which people attended church has declined over the past 20 years.

As Thom Rainer points out in his post on this subject, If the frequency of attendance changes, then attendance will respond accordingly. For example, if 200 members attend every week the average attendance is, obviously, 200. But if one-half of those members miss only one out of four weeks, the attendance drops to 175. Did you catch that? No members left the church. Everyone is still relatively active in the church. But attendance declined over 12 percent because half the members changed their attendance behavior slightly. ^[1] 

There are several reasons for this trend. First, Cultural Christians no longer see the need to go to church every week. Going to church weekly used to be normal behavior for Christians. But despite attending church, there were a lot of attenders who never got involved in the church. They sat in their pews or seats each week and listened to the preacher preach and then went home and had Sunday dinner and watched football. There was no engagement with the church. That is no longer the case. Attending church every week is no longer seen as one of the necessary requisites for sustaining Christianity. There are several reasons for this shift in thinking that I won’t go into in this post.

The second reason for less frequent attendance is the proliferation of single and blended families. If we consider that having shared custody of a child may mean that you get that child every other weekend, that has affected church attendance. Those with smaller children may attend church only on the weeks that they have the children – in order to take them to church. On the other hand, many families who share custody, particularly with older children will not come to church on the weeks that they have custody in order to spend more time with their children.

The last reason I want to focus on has a couple of different factors that affect it. First, the rise of technology, and second, a valid reason to attend. With the relatively quick rise of technology, it is no longer necessary to go to a local church to hear great music and listen to a great message by a nationally recognized leader. Anyone with a smartphone can tune in to great services each week that are headlined by speakers such as Andy Stanley, Steven Furtick or Brian Houston just to name a few. Why get out of bed and go to a church when I can stay in my own living room with a cup of coffee and listen to whoever I want on my computer or phone? Sure, we had TV preachers back in the day, but with the technology available to today’s youth, in particular, they no longer view community in terms of flesh and blood connection. They’re perfectly comfortable with connection through technology.

There are a number of other reasons that are affecting church attendance. There is a definite shift toward less frequent attendance though. If we are going to combat or offset this issue we’re going to need to create an environment in our churches that gives people a reason to attend more frequently.

Check back next time for more trends in the church. Follow me on twitter (@RealTomRawlings) for more trends, leadership and church growth tips.