by Rich Birch: Too often, church leaders only pay attention to weekend attendance and revenue patterns at their churches. Sometimes these numbers are referred to as “nickels and noses” or maybe the slightly more vulgar “butts and bucks.” However, there are many other factors to consider if we’re trying to understand what’s really happening inside our churches.

Attendance and revenue numbers are limited indicators; they are simply the result of other things taking place. To have a true understanding of how our churches are growing, we need to dive into leading indicators.

Leading indicators are numbers that demonstrate what’s happening under the hood of your church and reveal the direction it’s heading.

We measure and study those numbers because we believe that if we focus on measuring, we will see a greater difference in the lives of the people in our church and in the community that we serve. It’s been said that what we measure is what really matters to us. If we consistently only report on attendance and revenue numbers, then we send a subtle message to our leadership team that at the end of the day the only thing we care about are bigger numbers and more money.

We also need to move beyond how we feel about what’s happening at our church and look at the truth of the situation. Part of being a leader is defining reality, and numbers have a way of both doing that and sobering leaders in the process. Too many times I’ve heard church leaders talk about how they feel about what’s happening in their churches, but those feelings aren’t connected to reality in any way. Instead, we should be looking at numbers that reflect the truth about what’s actually happening at church.

An executive pastor or key team member should undertake the important practice of examining these numbers on a weekly, monthly, or quarterly basis. Keeping these metrics in front of your people can help the church develop strategies and approaches that drive your church to be more effective. Prevailing churches often have dashboards that they generate internally and distribute (via email or through other reporting mechanisms) that present these numbers graphically in order to keep people who aren’t interested in spreadsheets keyed in on what’s happening at the church.

The question for us is what numbers should we be looking at outside of attendance and revenue? Here are seven other areas that you can regularly study to help you understand what’s taking place in your ministry.

New-here Guests

When a church leader talks to me about growth, I frequently find myself asking them about their new guest numbers. Understanding the ratio of new-here guests to your total average attendance can provide a clearer picture of what’s happening from an evangelistic perspective. This important indicator demonstrates whether or not the church is drawing in new people on a regular basis.

A good rule of thumb to follow is this: The yearly average number of new-here guests should be equal to the average number of regular attendees on a single Sunday at your church.

Example 1: If your church averages 200 people on a Sunday, then every weekend you should be averaging about four guests per weekend.

Example 2: If your church has 500 people in attendance on a regular basis, then every weekend it would be reasonable for you to see 10 new guests.

If your church typically averages less than that ratio, it could be that your new-here process isn’t robust enough or you’re not effectively gathering information from your new-here guests to get them connected. Likewise, it could be that your front door simply isn’t wide enough and that you need to spend more time reaching out to your community.

Year-to-year Growth

I’m constantly surprised that many church leadership teams fail to reflect on what their regular attendance was a year ago in comparison to today. This is a relatively simple way to see what’s happening in the life of your church. By comparing numbers from year to year, you can quickly get a sense of the momentum that has been gained or lost in your church over the last year.

I suspect many churches don’t report their year-to-year attendance numbers because they’re concerned that it will show that their church has flatlined or is in decline. However, keeping that number in front of leaders will force people to ask, what are we doing to reach more people this year than we did last year? If, in a worst case scenario, your church is in decline, ask yourself, “why aren’t we growing, and why aren’t we impacting more people than we did at this point last year?”

Percentage of Volunteers

This is an important health metric for the church. In fact, I see this number as a core reflection of growth and potential for the future of a church. Oftentimes, churches that have plateaued or are in decline see somewhere around 20% of their people serving on a regular basis. You’ve heard the old adage that 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Well, that’s not a good percentage ratio for your church.

Engagement is critically important to a growing church and ensuring that your community has a high percentage of people serving regularly is an important factor that ensures engagement is possible. Tony Morgan states that 45% of your adults need to be serving in one way or another. This percentage is relatively consistent with numbers I’ve seen in growing churches; on any given weekend, 30% of the adults are volunteering in one way or another.

Let’s do the math: if your church had 300 people in attendance last weekend, it would be reasonable and appropriate to see 100 people serving next weekend.

What that number of volunteers does is provide a high level of service for your guests by aiding and driving growth. Volunteer percentage is a critically important piece of the puzzle that is necessary for us to understand what’s happening in the lives of our churches.

First-time Volunteers

An even more granular number to look at is the inflow of volunteers that serve on a regular basis. If you are not seeing a consistent increase in the number of people volunteering, it is clear something is happening to stunt engagement and the future health of your church.

If your volunteer influx reaches zero, you have a pipeline problem that you will not necessarily feel the pain of today but certainly will in six months to a year. In fact, by the time you feel that zero new volunteers are serving, it’s too late, and you’ve already entered into a volunteer engagement crisis that is difficult to recover from.

Ask yourself this question: how many first-time volunteers have we had in the past, how many do we have today, and is that number growing? If you’re averaging one new first-time volunteer every weekend, the question becomes how can you increase that percentage in the coming year? The trajectory of this number is more important than the absolute number.

Next-steps Indicators

Are people responding to what’s happening in the life of your church? Is there tangible evidence that the ministry is making a difference in people’s lives? Are people taking steps closer to Jesus? Where in the life of your church can you see new spiritual development? Are people signing up for your new believers’ class? What are the baptism numbers this year?

Finding a way to track next-steps indicators is an important way to examine the softer side of our ministry. Again, if these numbers atrophy, it’s an indicator that we need to change and adjust what we’re doing. We won’t feel the pain right away, but a year or two down the road our ministry will stall and begin to recede.

Gallons of Coffee Drank

This one’s a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but I do think there’s something important about trying to quantify and track community that’s taking place at your church. I know for us, offering coffee after our services provides a quantifiable number that shows how many people slowed down to talk to each other on a Sunday morning. If people aren’t taking the time to interact with one another, it indicates that we have a larger community problem.

While I understand that gathering in small groups develops a greater sense of community than a Sunday morning gathering, we don’t want our Sunday mornings to feel like a show. We don’t want people to arrive and feel so rushed to leave that they can’t slow down, grab a coffee, and talk with members of their church family. So, while gallons of coffee drank may seem like a funny metric to keep an eye on, the question I would have for you is what are some other ways that you could quantify community happening within your church on a Sunday morning?

Kids to Adults Ratio

Looking at the broader impact of your church, we need to consider how we’re reaching the next generation. Churches that are impacting their community are obsessed with reaching the next generation. They spend a lot of time, effort, and energy on reaching young people and getting them connected to the church. They spend resources to ensure these ministries are led and funded well and that should translate into regular interactions with the kids.

I’ve spoken with a number of church leaders whose churches are in the final gasps of death, and one commonality between all those conversations is an expressed sadness over the fact that there are no kids left in the church, that the Sunday school or kids’ ministry is sitting empty. Keeping a close eye on this ratio over time will give you a sense of the long-term trajectory of your church.

Tony Morgan states that 20% of your community needs to be reflected in your kids’ ministry. I’ve seen these numbers grow as high as 30%, or even close to 40% in some churches, which (to me) represents a healthy future. It says that this church is attracting young families and people who are in some of the most important decision-making times of their lives. In fact, 50% of all people who make decisions for Christ do so before the age of 13; as such, our churches need to think clearly about how we’re reaching and affecting the next generation.

What are some other numbers you’re tracking?

Looking just at “nickels and noses” gives you a flat indication of what’s happening in the life of your church. Taking a step back and looking at these other indicators gives you a fuller picture of what’s happening in the life of your church. It’s the difference between a black and white picture and a 3-D image.

What other metrics are you tracking in your church? How are you getting these metrics in front of people? What ways should you be presenting these numbers so that they tell the story about what God is doing in the life of your church? Every number has a name, every name has a story, and every story matters to God. Tracking numbers is ultimately about getting a clear picture of what God is doing in the life of people in our community.

Download PDF Article

Source: 7 Other Weekend Metrics Church Leaders Should Study Regularly – unSeminary

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by Rich Birch: I was struck by Tim Wu’s column in the New York Times called “The Tyranny of Convenience” a few months ago and it has stuck with me. Core to the thesis of this article is that convenience is at the center of what drives humans today. The author sites a lot of compelling arguments that organizations that are prevailing today are doing so because they are figuring out how to make life more convenient for people.

Amazon is on a constant quest to make it easier to purchase items that we “need” all the time. The “Amazon Dash” buttons are a great example of putting physical buttons around people’s homes they just need to click when they want Amazon to send them replacement items. Need some more toilet paper? Just click the button and that item will be added to your cart and sent your way!

Remember Napster? The file sharing service that millions of people used to get free music that they loved. What killed this industry disruption? It wasn’t the cease and desist letters or a wave of moral outrage over “file sharing”. Ultimately, the iTunes music store killed Napster because Apple figured out how to make purchasing music more convenient than Napster. Easy beat free. People want things convenient more than they want their money.

What difference does this make for us in the church? So many church leaders are bemoaning the decline of church attendance and engagement. What if we looked at that issue as a convenience issue? What if we took it upon ourselves to make what we do easier to fit into people’s lives? What if we made the main thing, the plain thing? What if we went out of our way to make it more simple and more straightforward to connect with our churches? Here are 5 actions at our churches I think we need to make more convenient with some suggestions on first steps towards making them easier!

Make it Simpler to Volunteer

Growing churches move people out of their seats and into service. They do this because they know that when people get engaged in the life of the church they are more likely to invite their friends. Churches grow because people invite their friends. In a very real way, getting people to volunteer at your church is a key leading indicator of growth. However, in far too many churches it’s just too hard to volunteer. Rather than creating simple ways for people to get plugged in, we create roadblocks to service.

3 Ways to Simplify Volunteering at Your Church

“Shallow End of the Pool” Opportunities // You can’t have people you don’t know very well serve in every role at the church but there are roles you could plug almost anyone into. Think about roles on your teams that you could (almost) take a first-time guest and have them try out. Have a few of these roles ready to plug people quickly into if they are showing interest.
Short-Term Asks // Give people a “taste” of serving with a one-time 2-hour opportunity like a community service project. People can get their head around a one-time service opportunity rather than needing to serve every week at the church. Use these “short-term” opportunities as an “on-ramp” to other opportunities. But beware if people just want to keep serving in these short-term opportunities – don’t punish them!
Orientation & Form Filling Out // Avoid sending people home with forms to fill out. Instead, take time within your orientation or “new here class” to actually fill out the paperwork that is needed. If people leave the building with the paperwork not filled out they are less likely to return with it done another time. Build “fill out the forms” time into your orientation or exploration process.

Remove Donation Friction

Have you tried to donate to your church? You’d be surprised at how hard this can be. Lots of churches have outdated and painful donation processes that feel more like a gauntlet than a smooth transaction. When people choose to give to your church they are literally choosing God over the things of this world so let’s make sure that process is as smooth as possible! Let’s ensure we do everything we can to remove the friction in this process!

5 Friction Points to Look for in Your Donation Process

Limited Options // If people can only give in the “bucket” during the service you are missing out … obviously! But are you only accepting one form of credit card online? Do you allow people to do bank transfers? What about stocks or securities? Give more options!
Login Required // A pet peeve of mine is needing to log on in order to make a donation through church websites. This practice is fading but surprisingly still common!
To Make “Funds” // Don’t make your people choose between half a dozen different “buckets” to give to your church. Making people choose means people will opt out.
Mobile Friendly // People are used to doing financial transactions on their phones. Can they donate from their phone?
Ask People // Email everyone who has donated to your church in the last three months and ask them how you can make the process easier for them. You’ll be amazed at the simple ideas people will give you.

Watch these videos to see smooth online giving processes: 36 Lessons We Learned from Donating Online to 10 Churches

Download this PDF as a discussion for your team: 5 Lessons from Amazon for Your Church’s Digital Giving Strategy

Help People Get Connected

People who stick and stay at your church will have friends at your church. They might come for the great teaching or great music or even fantastic kids programming but they will stay because they know some people. For people to stick long term they need to move church out of the category of a place they go to and into the category of the group of people they know. They need to transfer from thinking about the “leaders” of the church as the primary reason for attending and to the list of other “normal” people who are a part of the church. We all know this truth but we often stand in the way of making our church relational.

3 Things You Can Do THIS WEEKEND To Make Your Church More Relational

Name Tags // Seriously. Buy a bulk pack of those “Hello! My Name Is” name tags and have fun with it. Enlist a group of friendly people to ask people what name they’d like on their name tag. Slowing people down and asking them this simple question is the first step towards more relationships in your church.
Coffee // If your church isn’t serving coffee before or after the service you’re probably missing out on a simple way to build relationships. There is something about a cup of java in people’s hands to help them connect!
Groups & Teams Onboarding //  This weekend, ask 10 volunteers this question: “If someone wanted to get plugged into a group or onto a team, how would they do that?” If you don’t get the same (and simple) answer from people then your onboarding process is simply too complex.

Ease the Inviting Process

Only 2% of people who attend church will invite a friend to church this year. [ref] This is a problem because your church grows when people invite their friends. In my latest book, Church Growth Flywheel, we explore lots of ways to encourage your people to start talking to their friends about the church. I’m convinced that a key part of the reason that people don’t invite friends more is that we don’t make it convenient enough. It’s up to us to make it super easy for people to talk with their friends about the great things going on in our churches.

5 Ways to Make Inviting Easier at Your Church

Straightforward Series Titles // Put the cookies on the bottom shelf! If your people have to guess what the series is about then they won’t be inviting their friends. Stop trying to be so creative! A simple tip is to think about what people would be searching online to find the content that you’re talking about. Make it easy to understand at face value.
Invite Cards // These simple tools continue to be an effective way to help your people invite their friends. A blurb about what’s coming up at your church with some compelling graphics and all the “dates & times” details and you’re ready to go! People use these cards to pass along to people that might be interested in coming to their church plus they serve as a physical reminder to people when they take them home.
What to Expect // A best practice for inviting is to ensure that prominently on your website is a “what to expect” section where your potential guests can get a sense of what coming to your church is going to be like. We take for granted when we attend church all the time how anxious this experience can be. Imagine you were going to attend a synagogue or mosque and think about the questions you’d have about that experience. Pictures and videos are particularly great for these parts of your website.
Invite to Invite! // Don’t forget to ask people to invite their friends. Your people will need reminders of how important this aspect of their faith is. Ask them directly to invite friends and family to various things at the church. Model to your people who you are connecting with to come to church. Share stories of how people have invited friends and when people have been inviting and impacted by the church! Turn up the inviting culture in your teams and groups by having these smaller groups of people pray for people that they’re inviting.
Compelling Content // Generate great social media content that people will want to share with their friends. In fact, the content needs to start with what will be shared and be about the church as a secondary goal. Generate helpful content that answers the questions people are asking. (Hint: Ask your people what question they or their friends have that you should be answering!) Aim to be consistent and compelling in your social content and it will make it easier for people to invite their friends.

Show People a Leadership Pathway

How do people move from serving at your church to leading at your church? What’s the pathway they need to follow in order to grow in their leadership with the church?

One of the ironies of too many churches is that we complain that we don’t have enough leaders but at the same time the pathway to how people become leaders isn’t clear. Rather than being an obvious and clear process, it’s often shrouded in mystery and wonder. Make it easier for people to take their next steps in leadership and you’d be amazed at how many leaders will step up to lead!

3 Key Ways to Clarify Your Leadership Pathway

Make it Visual // A simple drawing helping people understand the visual framework of the process that someone follows is an important tool in your clarification tool belt. LifeWay Leadership has been doing some great work with their Leadership Pipeline to develop great language and understanding in this area. Find a compelling framework and continue to communicate it over and over until it sticks. (Or until your people start making fun of you for talking about it so much!)
Everyone Has An Apprentice // One of the simplest ways to drive leadership development is to ensure that every leader has an apprentice serving with them. This natural mentoring relationship is a big step towards passing leadership to the next level of people. Requiring that people have an apprentice if they want to lead is a great step towards developing a leadership development system. If people are interested in leading, their first step is to apprentice under someone else. A part of that conversation is who they can bring on to apprentice under them before they step up to lead.
Training … Training … Training // Churches that prevail in this area are finding ways to train at every phase of the leadership experience. They are taking it upon themselves to ensure that people are growing in their leadership regardless of where they are. Growing churches don’t leave this training piece up to “happenstance” but are looking for places to infuse it into everything they’re doing. From weekly huddles when people arrive to serve to full-on leadership conferences, prevailing churches are getting leadership development resources in front of their people. They’re not waiting for people to come to them looking for development, but going to them instead!

Source: 5 Actions Your Church Needs to Make Way More Convenient – unSeminary

The post 5 Actions Your Church Needs to Make Way More Convenient appeared first on Passion for Planting.

by Patrick Bradley: You may need to find some temporary launch team members if you find yourself short a few hands as you gear up for the launch of your worship gatherings.

Building a Launch Team is hard work. Some planters get a head start through several families coming with them from a sending church. Some convince friends or family to move across country to the new community.

But whether you have a head start or not, you still have to recruit plenty more from the community. Believers and not-yet-believers both.

You need somewhere in the neighborhood of at least 40-50 adults on your launch team to fully staff weekly worship gatherings. The ‘new normal’ weekend experience with excellent music, quality children’s ministry, hot coffee hospitality, video projection, etc. creates a serious demand for volunteers.

With fewer than 40 workers, you won’t be able to fully staff the various ministries. Or worse, you’ll use every volunteer every Sunday to pull of the gatherings and burn them out quickly.

About a month from your launch of weekly worship gatherings, you need to have most of the 40+ adults on the team. Every planter puts in lots of prayer, time on the ground, and hard work. Even so, some planters I’ve supported over the years found themselves with no more than 30 workers about a month out. Finding another 10 committed launch team members in the last few weeks is unusual. And it’s certainly not enough time for them to fully catch the vision and get adequate training in their ministry area.

Barrelling ahead with only 30 yields predictable results: volunteer shortages and burnout. One alternative to postponing launch is finding…

Temporary Launch Team Members

I’ve heard them called lots of things over the years:

short-term missionaries
scaffolding
SWAT Team (servants willing and temporary)

The basic idea is that you approach other churches in your region. The temporary launch team members commit to a fixed term, often 6 months, with the express understanding that they will return to the sending church at the end of their term. The sending church doesn’t feel threatened that you’re stealing anyone. And the workers don’t feel like they’re signing up for a life sentence.

Start with churches in your tribe or network. But God may very well have been preparing another congregation in your city and they’re just waiting to be asked. I’ve seen it.

You’d work with that church to provide already-trained workers for specific ministry roles, like:

playing in the band
teaching kids (make sure they’ve passed a background check)
ushering
hospitality

Though they come trained, you will need to brief them on your church plant’s mission and vision so that they can live it out while they’re with you. They also need a basic understanding of your church’s values, strategies and events calendar.

One question that you need to think through in advance is whether you’d be asking for their tithes, too. Work that out with the sending church. They may or may not be OK with the temporary launch team members transferring their giving for the 6 months.

Having them, especially for a fixed term, creates some stability and buys you time to grow your indigenous team.

But it’s not a viable solution for much more than 6 months. The workers will get tired, long for home or resent the situation. Your church will be addicted to the extra workers and hit crisis when they inevitably depart.

Instead, at the end of their term, find ways to celebrate their contribution and send them back with a blessing.

If you find yourself short of the number of launch team members you’ve been praying for, consider recruiting some temporary ones.

The post Do You Need Temporary Launch Team Members? appeared first on Church Planting Tactics.

Source: Do You Need Temporary Launch Team Members?

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by Rich Birch: The only people who like big churches are pastors.

One of the paradoxes that churches face as they grow beyond 1,000 in attendance is that they actually need to act more like a small church in some ways. The “competition” of large and growing churches is actually much smaller churches where people are “known” by others. Your church is going to need to find new ways to ensure people feel connected to your church if you are wanting to grow beyond the 1,000 barrier.

People stick and stay at your church because they find community and care there. They find a sense of “home” and relationship. They may be attracted by the great teaching, fantastic kids programs, and amazing music; but they will only stay if they find relationships with real people to help them stay connected. Ultimately, they need to find friends who they recognize at the church. There are a number of ways your church can work in, in order to ensure people perceive your church as relationally connecting people. You need to be seen as a warm and caring community long before people will find an actual community. (This is true of all churches regardless of their size.)

On the journey of growing your church to this size, you probably went through a phase where you needed to “play bigger” … do things that larger churches do in order to instill confidence in people to invite their friends. Ironically, as you grow, you actually need to dial back some of those things because your size can work against you reaching people. If people perceive that you’re just obsessed with being bigger they will be turned off. Here are 5 ways to ensure your church is staying personal and relational as you grow:

Avoid generic@ Email Addresses

Stop using those generic email inbox accounts. Let people know that there are real live people who answer the emails as your churches and not a faceless organization. When you use those generic email addresses you are subtly communicating to your people that your team is untouchable and unreachable. The sorts of addresses we’re talking about are:

info@
office@
hello@
team@

Managing email is a lot of work, yes. Often leaders are overwhelmed by how many inbound emails they receive. The “generic” email account is an attempt to stem that tide and deal with requests by a group of people. Rather than doing that, have a team manage your leader’s email inboxes. People from your church will understand when they email a team member of your church and that email is passed onto another person who helps solve their problem. When done well, that contact makes your people feel special—not ignored or treated like a number.

Pick up the Phone!

How do you feel when you call a business or organization and you hear the call automatically routed over to voicemail?

What happens inside of you when you need to “push 1 for customer service … push 2 for support …”?

A “simple” way your church can stay relationally connected is to have a real, live person pick up the phone and answer it. It’s not as “efficient” as just making people route their own calls through the menu and such, but the human interaction speaks volumes about the importance of people to your church. As your church grows, there are volunteers who can be trained towards this role. Alternatively, a service like Call Ruby could also handle phone calls for you for a cost lower than a full-time staff member.

I’ve known the pain of people who have a serious pastoral care situation only to be met with a “voice jail” and an inability to navigate the tree to find the right people, largely due to the fact that they are in the midst of a pastoral care crisis. Our voice mail system just added insult and injury to a tough personal situation. Our system reinforced a lingering suspicion that our church was only interested in “being bigger” and “lost touch” with people. We earned the criticism… it was, unfortunately, true in this case.

As I was writing this article, I picked up the phone and called Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, IL; Life.Church in Oklahoma City, OK; and North Point Church in Alpharetta, GA. The combined attendance of these three churches is over 100,000. If these churches have figured out how to scale this one aspect of staying personal, I’m sure your church can too!

Clear & Obvious Path for People to Get Connected

There seems to be an inverse relationship between the number of programs a church talks about with their people and its size. The larger the church—it seems like—the less “programs” they talk about. They’ve figured out how to narrow the focus and move people to get connected. However, smaller churches seem to list a long menu of lots of programs and ministries that people might want to connect with.

Churches that have been able to jump the 1,000 barrier had made a clear and obvious pathway for people to walk to get connected. There are simple steps that people don’t need to wonder about. It’s overtly stated and simple to follow. Your church would be wise to constantly look at this part of what you do and ask if there is anything else you can do to make it clearer and more obvious as to how people can get connected to your church.

Although it is nuanced across a wide variety of styles and approaches to the church, there are some common elements to this pathway that we’re seeing in prevailing churches:

New Here Gifts // Both to thank guests and to ask them for contact information.
Next Steps “Class” // A simple & regular event to get people to learn more about the church and to make a few new friends.
Teams & Groups // For a clear understanding about the paths for serving on a team and building community in a group.

Name tags … seriously

Where can you insert name tags into your experience? (I know … some people hate name tags!) I’m a convert when it comes to using name tags in churches. I used to think it was a crazy idea, but I’ve been convinced that every church should be looking at adding them to their game. Of course, you won’t be able to get 100% of your people to take a name tag, but it’s worth the effort. I’m talking about trying to get people to wear a name tag sticker that your team fills out their name on, not a predone name tag that people pick up somewhere.

Some of the reasons I’ve become convinced of this first hand are:

Guest Oriented // People want to be known. I know that there is a school of thought that says that people want to be totally anonymous when they arrive at church. The dangerous application of this belief is that we go out of the way to make it hard for people to connect. We want to give people space to control their experience with our church, but we also want to meet them when they are ready to connect. The goal is to move them from anonymity to community. Asking them to fill out a simple name tag is a small step toward being part of the community.
It’s an Invitation to Talk // Our hope is that when people come to church they connect with the community… the goal is to get people talking to each other! People love to hear their own name… it’s the sweetest word they hear all day. By offering name tags, we are multiplying out lots of great conversations in church. What a positive emotion to associate with our church!
Creates Service Opportunities // In order to make name tags for large crowds, you need a lot of people who are ready to make them up. This creates more service opportunities… more service opportunities mean more people are connected to the church!
Helpful for Your Team // Let’s be honest … you can remember maybe 200 people’s names when you see their faces, but you can probably remember stuff about 1,500 people when given their face and name. (Think about Facebook… the fact that you see people’s names and faces boosts your recall about the details of other people’s lives big time!) The name tag helps your team remember a little bit more about your people by just giving them a little bit of information about your guests.
It’s Not About You … // Name tags by definition are about the other people around us, not ourselves. It’s a declaration that I’m not the center of this universe… that I acknowledge that everyone doesn’t know me… that I’m not that big of a deal. When we put on a name tag we are serving other people who might feel uncomfortable coming up to you.

The challenge for your church is to see where in your ministry you could add name tags to make it more relational. Maybe you don’t want to dive headlong and add them to the main adult service but there are lots of other places where you can use them. Put them out on a table when your volunteers show up for training. Encourage your small groups to do them for the first few weeks when they meet. Get them on people at your “new here” receptions. As you see the impact of people having these simple tools in your midst, I’m convinced you’ll want to add them to more environments.

Add Coffee to Your Foyer

The smell of coffee means welcome and community. Our culture has been trained to associate drinking coffee with connecting with people. (Thanks Starbucks!) Many churches remove coffee from what they offer as they grow because of the cost and complexity of doing it at scale. That’s a mistake. Coffee slows your community down as they come and go from your services and encourages people to talk with each other.

Crossroads Church in Cincinnati has been named the fastest growing church in two of the last three years. Nearly 30,000 people attend their services regularly. Coffee is a big part of their front-end guest experience. In fact, for years they had a picture of a coffee cup on the home page of their website. (At the time of writing this, they still had that coffee cup as their icon on their various social media profiles.) If you bump into their leadership and ask them what the deal is with coffee, they will effuse about how it speaks to a larger reality of what they are looking at being as a church. Clearly, they have a lot more going on than just great coffee that is driving their growth, but they are a good example of a church using coffee at scale to help build community and connection.

I’m not even a huge coffee drinker and I’ve seen this dynamic play out in my ministry over the years! The campuses that we had where we offered coffee do have a more relational feel to the foyers, and those that don’t are lacking something. I know it’s a stretch financially as you grow because it becomes increasingly complex to offer a lot of coffee at scale in a short amount of time, but it may help to consider it!

I’d love to hear from you.

Only 2% of churches push beyond 1,000 people in attendance. It’s a complex adventure leading your church into that territory. I’d love to hear from you about what you are learning as you attempt it. Here are some past articles from unSeminary to help you:

5 Reasons Kids’ Ministry is So Important to Churches that Want to Break the 1,000 Barrier
5 Characteristics of Church Staff Teams that Break the 1,000 Barrier
7 Pivots Churches Make to Break the 1,000 Barrier

Source: 5 Ways Churches That Want to Break the 1,000 Barrier Stay Personal & Relational – unSeminary

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