Growth And Assimilation - Part 2

February 14, 2011

In the last blog I shared with you that if a church is going to grow, it must be intentional about growth. We can’t just wait around and expect people to find us. We have to aggressively pursue them. Fast-growing churches understand that they have to be intentional about the process. Fast-growing church also understand that if you are going to go fishing for people, you have to have more than one line in the water. While we would hope for the best and expect our people to invite their friends to Church, we would be naive’ to think that they are doing so.

It really shouldn’t surprise anyone to realize that if you are intentional about inviting your community to Church, and will employ multiple methods, you will experience greater growth. Honestly, this shouldn’t be an earth shattering surprise. However, question four asked: On average, how many first-time guests visited your church each month in 2010?

The results of that question were a little surprising. Those churches that used primarily word-of-mouth (46%) were experiencing only 1 to 5 visitors a month. The majority of churches using multiple methods (50%) were seeing 30+ new people walk through their doors each month. I would say that is a pretty big difference.

It’s expensive to use multiple methods to reach out to a community. In this economy, many churches can barley afford to keep the lights on. What’s the solution? Think about it as an investment. If you were able to gain one family from your marketing or outreach strategy each month and that family started to give back to God, His way, your money problems would go away.

My question is simple: Why is it that the first thing to be cut during hard times is always the worst thing to cut? (Marketing and outreach.) The very thing we need to continue to grow always seems to be the first thing on the chopping block. The next is evangelism.

If you are going to grow your church during these hard economic times, you have to be willing to take the risk of putting multiple lines in the water and design an intentional strategy that includes serious investment in marketing, outreach and evangelism.

Posted 2/14/2011 in Stephen Gray | 0 Comments - Add Comment