Greetings, Friends!
I’d like to share with you an abbreviated version of an article written by Tony Morgan, founder of The Unstuck Group (a church consulting group). The article is titled, “Increasing First-Time Guests: 3 Questions to Expand the Front Door of Your Church.” (For the complete text this article, go to https://careynieuwhof.com/3-questions-to-expand-the-front-door-of-your-church/)
“Nearly every church leader I know is concerned with ‘closing the back door’ at his or her church. But I’ve found the ‘front door’ is usually the bigger issue.
To see growth, you’ll need more new guests each year than your total average attendance on a Sunday…. It takes intentionality to reach people outside the church and outside the faith. The natural tendency of every church is to become inward-focused over time.
Does your church have a front door problem? If so, I’d encourage you to process these three questions together with your leadership team.
1. Who should we be reaching?
You need a clear picture in your mind of who in your community God has called you to reach.
With this in mind, I’d encourage you to engage a conversation with your leadership team to identify who your church should be focused on reaching. To navigate this conversation, you can ask these key questions:
· Who is in our community?
· Of those people, who are we trying to reach?
· What’s important to them?
· How does our strategy approach address what’s most important to them?
At The Unstuck Group, we’ve learned that the more clarity churches have about who they are trying to reach, and the more intentionality in ministry strategy churches have to reach them, the more likely the church is to reach a broad cross-section of their community.
The reverse is not true.
When there’s no intentionality or, in some cases, total disregard for who the church should be reaching, the church struggles to reach its community and very few people are saved.
2. How do we reach them?
You can’t program your way to health and the ability to reach new people. In other words, starting an evangelism program and conducting evangelism training won’t fix this issue.
Instead, the church must focus its entire ministry strategy on reaching people outside the church and then helping people become disciples of Jesus.
If, for example, you want to reach a diverse group of dechurched, millennial, young adults in your community, then everything you do must reflect that focus.
· Your worship services must be designed with that person in mind.
· Your discipleship strategy must be designed with that person in mind.
· Your nursery environment must be designed with that person in mind.
· Your physical space and your online strategy have to be designed with that person in mind.
In other words, you have to become a church for diverse, dechurched, millennial young adults to reach diverse, dechurched, millennial young adults.
The primary way people will end up connected to your church is if those in your church invite their friends and family members. Creating compelling environments, including worship services, will help fuel those invites.
3. Are we winning or not?
Let me share some data from Gary McIntosh and Charles Arn in their book What Every Pastor Should Know: 101 Indispensable Rules of Thumb for Leading Your Church. These are some key metrics you can track to determine whether or not you have a healthy front door:
· If the church is growing, you’ll need more first-time guests each year than you have people in your total average attendance. In other words, a growing church of 500 will need more than 500 first-time guests in a year.
· The typical growing church sees 20% of first-time guests become part of the church.
· Growing churches see nearly 40% of second-time guests become part of the church.
· Close to 60% of people will become part of the church after their third visit.
As you can see, the odds of someone becoming part of the church increase dramatically if we can encourage them to come back for a second and third visit. The first thing we should be inviting every first-time guest to do is to come back next Sunday.
One of the reasons why you may have a front-door problem is that you’ve never tracked the number of first-time guests to know if you’re winning or not. Setting a target and then monitoring your progress will challenge your team to become more intentional about developing a comprehensive strategy for reaching people outside the church and outside the faith.”
This is Pastor Rich again: I encourage you to read the entire article online. Always remember: Church growth is not about building a huge congregation; it’s about fulfilling the Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you” (Matthew 28:19-20a).
Pastor Rich