What would it take to grow your church by 10%?
No church can grow just by opening its doors on Sunday and receiving first-time visitors. The math just doesn’t work.
Take a church of 500 members. Attrition will be about 20% a year, mainly from death, disaffection and relocation. That means the congregation must add 100 new constituents a year just to stay even.
To grow by 10%, the church needs to add an additional 50 constituents a year, or a total of 150.
What does it take to add 150 new constituents in a year’s time? The most aggressive membership development plan can convert 90% of visitors into members. That means responding to Sunday visitors on the day of their first visit and then continuing to follow up through personal visits, new-member classes and small-group invitations. Wait a week, and the return goes down to 50%. Wait two weeks, and the return nears zero. Fail to do aggressive follow-up, also zero.
To add 150 members just from Sunday-visitor flow, you will need close to four visitors each Sunday. And you will need the supporting infrastructure:
- Methods for obtaining visitors’ basic contact information (name, phone, email).
- A senior pastor who will make contacting visitors the same Sunday a top priority. (Yes, the yield is best when the senior pastor makes the first contact.)
- A process for adding visitors to mailing lists and initiating a tracking system.
- A planned second Sunday response.
- Further planned responses — such as invitations to lunch, small-group invitations, new-member conversations every three weeks — and a system (and staff) to track each person.
This scenario means a lot of visitors, a lot of planning and a lot of work. I happen to believe the work is worth doing. You need to decide that for yourself. Recognize that it’s relentless: every Sunday, every season, every year. Otherwise, attrition will get you.
The problem, of course, is that fewer and fewer new people are showing up on Sunday. People beyond your current membership need to be touched, nurtured and cultivated throughout the week. They need to be shown pathways to affiliation that don’t depend on becoming a Sunday morning regular.
What kind of yield can you expect in what I call “touch management”? If you touch 1,000 lives and cultivate 100 as leads you might get 10 to affiliate. Therefore, in the example for adding 150, you need to touch 15,000 people, and you need to be more aggressive in lead cultivation.
A 500-member church probably is already touching 15,000 lives through its many forms of presence in the community. You just need to recognize those touches and respond to them.
You can see why so few churches manage to grow. The workload is daunting, and it requires placing a consistent priority on growth — even when growth means change. Not a once-a-year program, but every week, every Sunday, every visitor.
You will need a cadre of people trained, committed and deployed for membership development. Not a few greeters on Sunday, but a team of a dozen people (plus key staff) who make this their primary ministry.
TOM EHRICH is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is a founder of the Church Wellness Project churchwellness.com. His Web site is morningwalkmedia.com.
