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 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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