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

What is your definition of Church Success?

Hi All,

How you define success as a church affects almost everything you do, so you need to make sure your get it right. Get it wrong, and you will be leaning your proverbial ladder up against the wrong wall. Get it right, and you can make a difference for eternity in the lives of many, and earn yourself a "Well done, good and faithful servant" from the Lord.

I'm going to cut to the chase and give you this definition as revealed in "Entrepreneurial Faith". The full name of the book is: "Entrepreneurial Faith: Launching Bold Initiatives to Expand God's Kingdom" by Walt Kallestad, Kirbyjon Caldwell, and Paul Sorensen. It's a great book; maybe I'll do a review soon. But for now, I just want you to see this definition of church success from them (in my own words as a formula): "Success = Obedience + Faith.

OBEDIENCE: Jesus told the story (Matthew 21) of the father who asked each of his sons to do something. The first son said "I will not" but then later on changed his mind and went to work in the vineyard as asked. The second son said "Yes" right away when asked, but then never did go work in the vineyard. Question asked by Jesus, "Who obeyed his father?" Summary: Obedience is key to church success, and life success. If you do not obey, nothing else matters.

But here is where we part with the clan of Christians who believe that obedience is enough. They couch it in pious terms like, "Jesus didn't call us to be successful, just faithful." And by 'faithful' they mean obedient at best, and at worst, if we just go through the motions of doing what God has called us to do then that is all He asks of us.

But this sort of mentality forgets other important verses, like the parable of the talents, in which the master was not content that his servants took care of what was his and just kept their nose clean. He was looking for a profit, for a benefit, for a result from the talents he entrusted to his servants. Those servants were expected by him to go out and invest and risk and try to do something with the vast sums of money to which they were entrusted. They were required to walk by faith and make something happen. That is, obedience alone was not sufficient; he was expecting some initiative and some valour and some courage to make a difference. Obedience for the sake of the status quo would not be enough. They were expected to exercise FAITH.

FAITH: Obedience is needed, but not only obedience. And faith is needed, but not only faith. We need them both. "Obedience puts faith into action" is one of the statements that Caldwell and Kallestad make in their book. James said "Faith without works is dead."

Why are these both needed? Because faith is what energizes all of our obedience with spiritual power. If we just dully obey God without any faith, we are like the elder brother in the parable of the prodigal son, who dutifully obeyed his father by working in the fields as he should, and yet he had no love, no joy, no sense of life. The prodigal son at least sinned boldly and learned his lesson. The elder brother was just as miserable in a long-term chronic way.

Put them both together, friends: Obedience + Faith, and you've got a winning combination for Christian success and church success. BTW, if you want to buy the book you can get it in the HighPower Books section here. It's on page two of the "Church Growth" section.

That's what I've learned this week, and it's making me think.

For Christ and His Kingdom,

Dr. Bill

Coaching Success Stories

HI All,

Just wanted to share with you three stories from our church in the past year which demonstrate the power and value of Christian coaching, and it's incredible potential to change lives.

First up is Karen, who was receiving some life coaching. She was asked during one coaching session, "What would you do if God granted you the freedom to do anything for Him?" (Great coaching question. For more coaching resources go to: http://www.highpowerresources.com/Coaching/Resources.htm) Karen thought for a long time; an uncomfortably long time of silence, and then a bright smile came across her face. She had remembered a dream she had as a young woman to raise foster children. She had given it up when she had kids of her own. The coach asked, "What's stopping you?" (Another great coaching question.) Answer: "Nothing." And she is pursuing her dream now.

Second story is a ministry coaching success story about Jim. Initially he was helping with a ministry in the church, and was treating it more as a 'favor' for the staff person who had asked him. Then that staff person began to learn coaching skills. The top three rules of coaching are "1. The client does the work. 2. The client does the work. 3. The client does the work." The staff person began to discover Jim's motivations for ministry through coaching questions that get to the heart. Then, instead of the staff person coming up with his own action plans for the ministry and asking Jim to do it, this staff/coach now asked Jim what he wanted to do, and more importantly, how he wanted to do it. Jim began to develop ownership for the ministry. And as he did this, his involvement, commitment and zeal went way up. Jim began recruiting his own team to help him with the ministry. And now it has taken off with a solid team of its own. The staff person no longer needs to oversee every detail of the ministry. He is now there just to encourage and cheer on the team. That is the power of ministry coaching to help people own and grow their own ministries.

Third story is about Angela, who was both being coached as a single mom, and learning to coach others. Angela was a single mom who had been addicted to, and sold meth amphetamines. She accepted Christ and the Holy Spirit began to work in her heart and life. She started being coached and it is helping her to get 'unstuck' in the tricky parts of life, even though it is a little tough right now. A coach is helping her to make the right choices and then stick to them through regular accountability. Plus Angela is learning how to be a coach others. She is helping a young woman to make good choices in her marriage. This second woman is getting hope and encouragement from a Christian coach, who just a few years ago, would have tried to sell her drugs instead of giving her coaching help. That is the power of Holy Spirit empowered coaching to change lives for the better!

For Christ & His Kingdom,

Dr. Bill

Your Church's Image in the Community, Part 4

Hi All,

Finishing up some thoughts on how to shape your image in the community, this week, How long will it take? That is, how long will it take for you as a church to become known for what you want to be known about (assuming you know what that image is)?

This is influenced by the following factors: the age of your church, the growth/transience of your community, the size of the large, community-shaping events you choose, the amount of press coverage, or word-of-mouth buzz you get, and people's memories.

If you are a church plant, you have an (almost) clean slate to work with; if you have been around for awhile, you have your previous image to overcome or change. Both of these can be shaped rather quickly with a large, community-image shaping event, if you can get good coverage or buzz because of it. In some communities all this will take is a couple of good newspaper stories; in larger communities it will take some TV time. Our church plant was in a smallish Chicago suburb, meeting in a 30-screen movie theater complex. It took just a couple of newspaper articles about interesting series we were doing, to get the positive buzz we needed to bring in new people.

If you are in a town with a good annual parade, be sure to take advantage of it, to present the image you want seen about your church. Want to emphasize your family ministry? Get a float and fill it with kids in bright clothes singing happy fun songs. We did a couple of parades in our town with some memorable floats for two years in a row. One year we made a giant golden pyramid, and put up a banner that said, "Let my children go, to __________ Church!" The kids were dressed up like Egyptians and singing fun songs like "King Tut". We made the front page of a large suburban newspaper!

If you have been around for a while, this will take longer. You will have to work harder to remake your image. This make take some large, newsworthy event to help reshape your image. For example, when we were doing a series called "Big Questions from the Big Screen", we did a theme service on the Wizard of Oz, and brought in one of the original munchkins from the show. This was newsworthy and got us some press coverage, and a number of new visitors.

The growth/transience of your community is also a factor. If you are a new church, and the community has slow growth, this works in your favor. Because you are new in a community without a lot of change, you will be the current local buzz for a while when you start. If you are in a community with a high growth or transience rate, then you will be on more of a level playing field with everybody else, trying to get the community's attention.

Finally, concerning people's memories, if you are in the unfortunate situation of being in a church that has had a traumatic past; either a church split, or God forbid, the death of a child or teenager in your ministry, you have a situation that will work against you for years and years. You will constantly have to be demonstrating how you are not that church of the past anymore. This will set back your efforts and make it more difficult to determine the image you want to present. But it can be done by establishing some annual traditions that set your church up as family-friendly. Every Memorial Day in one church, after 9/11, we invited in all the police & fire departments to our church. We invited in the boy scouts to carry the flag and the local VFW bugle group to play "Taps". We made Memorial Day a can't-miss event for our church full of pageantry, patriotism and meaningful reminders of sacrifices for our country, combined with the Great Sacrifice of Jesus. It not only shaped our image in the community, but helped our congregation to own some important values.

But the area in which you have the greatest control is the Series topics which you choose to focus upon. Make some promo cards for every series you do; print and mail them to thousands of people in your community, or hand out small business-sized cards that your people can hand out to their friends. Run some newspaper ads along with it. If you do these consistently for a year, for about four times throughout the year, with some well-chosen topics, you will begin to reshape the focus and image of your church in your community.

I share all this simply because we want to glorify God and make Jesus look good. Do what you can to lift up the name of Jesus and exalt Him and what He can do for your community. Let the children come to Him; help marriages to be rebuilt by Him; let lives be filled with joy because of Him. Lift Him up. He is the best focus and image you can have as a church! Lift up Jesus!

For Jesus and the Kingdom,

Dr. Bill