by Rich Birch: How do you know that a church service is “successful”?
What are the elements that tell you when things are working or not?
It’s important that your team shares a clear understanding of what success looks like when it comes to designing weekend services. While there are many different factors that could determine whether a church service is successful or not, community engagement is a key component. We don’t want people to feel so disconnected from what’s happening in the service that they find it boring or disengaging.
How can you find ways to increase engagement? Everyone who is involved in planning weekend services should be concerned with how to cultivate a sense of connectedness. It should also be a given that we need to move beyond simply engaging and focusing on the people in the first few rows that we can see from our platforms. As worship leaders, we often fail to look beyond the front rows to the people in the back who arrived with a coffee in one hand and suspicion in the other. We need to see them too in order to evaluate whether we’re successfully promoting engagement throughout our entire community. A preacher usually hears the two or three people that give verbal feedback or nod their heads wildly in agreement, and we assume that the entire audience shares that level of engagement—this just isn’t the case. Engagement needs to work its way through our entire community from the front row, all the way to the back. Here are six ways that you could increase engagement during this weekend’s services at your church…
Source: 6 Ways to Increase Engagement in Your Church’s Weekend Services – unSeminary