Church Growth Math

Hi All,

I know that most of you have finished with math classes long ago, but it's time to go back and consider some basic principles of church growth. If you follow along with this, you will discover why assimilation of your guests is absolutely critical to church growth.

First, some basics: if your church grows at a rate of 10% a year, then you will double in 7 years. So if your church is 200 and you grow by 20 your first year, 22 your second, 24 your third, etc. in 7 years, you will be a church of 400. If your church is 500, and you grow by 50 the first year, 55 the second, 60 the third, etc, you will be a church of 1,000 in 7 years.

Now, this new growth can come from three primary sources: births, transfers, conversions.

-- Births - The national birth rate is at just over 2% right now. Your area may be more or less than the national average. If you have many young families in your church, you may have a 3% birth rate.

-- Transfers refer to Christians who move into your church from other churches.

-- Conversions, of course, are people from the community who your church reaches and brings to salvation, who then begin attending your church.

Put these all together, and if you can reach 10% a year, you are experiencing healthy growth; 5% a year is fine, and 15-20% is phenomenal growth.

However, and here is where it gets tricky, you must also factor in your loss rate. Your church is shrinking at the same time you are trying to help it to grow. It is losing people through death (1-3%), through moving away (2-5%), and through fall offs of people going elsewhere or not attending anywhere.  You could be shrinking at 5-10% a year.

When you add these into the mix it becomes, as you would expect, rather difficult to maintain growth in your church. Your net loss has to first be met, and then you need to gain enough additional people to move beyond your losses into the realm of growth. That takes some work.

Since the experts tell us that most churches are plateaued or declining, if you are experiencing any attendance growth at all, you are already in the minority.

The key to experiencing growth then, is to make sure you do a great job at assimilation. It is hard enough to get people to visit a new church. When they do, you need to make sure that you do all you can to retain them. Here's how the math works on this, in terms of church growth assimilation.

Let's say your goal is 10% growth per year, and you are a church of 500, so you hope to have a net retention rate (after factoring in the losses we mentioned above) of 50 people this year.

(I recite all these numbers simply so that you can compare your church to this 10% standard and see where you fit in comparison. I'll use a church of 500 in the following, and then you can factor your numbers up or down for comparison...)

And then let's say you have 10 new people per Sunday visit your church. That would be about 500 people per year who walk through the doors of your church for the first time. Now please note that in order to achieve this desired goal of 50 people per year (with a 10% assimilation rate), you will have to have 10 totally new people each and every Sunday. That means that the 10 new people who came to your church last weekend, don't count if they show up again the next Sunday. That would be great, but you will need 10 totally new people the following Sunday.

You need to have an assimilation rate of 10% in order to attain your growth goal. So for every 10 people who walk through your door, you need to keep 1 of them. That's 4 new people a month; that's 13 a quarter. That means if you have a quarterly membership class, you should be having about 13 people in each class who sign on for membership.

But let's say that you don't have 10 new people a Sunday. Let's say you only have 5 new people per week. That would be 250 visitors a year. If you want to retain your growth rate of 10% growth, and you are a church of 500, then you will need to keep 20%! of your guests. Since you are only attracting 250 visitors a year, or 5 a weekend, you must keep more of them every week to achieve 10% growth.

The other option, of course, if you cannot achieve a 20% assimilation rate, is to increase your visitor rate. If you are not retaining that many guests, then you need to increase the number of guests coming through the door. So if your outreach is poor, you need to be better at assimilation.

Which are you better at, getting people to visit your church for the first time, or keeping them once they show up?

(I know the goal is to do both, but let's look at what you can do right now, and then work on the rest.)

This has been a little church growth math to help you think through some of the details involved in making it happen at your church.

Next week we will talk about some key aspects of assimilation, or visitor retention.

Of course, we must remind you that the ultimate goal here is disciples of Jesus Christ. That is why we are even talking about it. We want to fulfill Christ's words in the Great Commission to "make disciples of all nations". Why are we talking about church growth? Because each one of these people represents a person for whom Jesus died. Let's reach them in His name for His sake.

For Christ and His Kingdom,
Dr. Bill