Economy Hammers A Key Sector of Church Growth
by
By Allen Ratta
It used to be that if you pastored a church in the suburbs of Las Vegas, Central Florida and other fast growing suburban areas (and did not make too many mistakes) you could claim church growth guru status. I personally know the joys of pastoring in a community where the bare wood of new home construction stretched as far as the eye could see. You could sit on both hands, close your eyes and the church would still grow. There were large numbers of new families moving into those new homes and a good percentage of them were shopping for a church home with a limited supply of options. Even churches with unhealthy processes could flourish in such an environment.
Fast-forward to the economic meltdown of the last two years and the landscape has dramatically changed. Vast tracts of windswept empty building lots sit with no sign of development. Many pastors that experienced the blessings of “geographic” church growth, i.e. church growth based on location, are experiencing the shock of a largely static community for the first time. Welcome to the rest of the church world.
The most recent recession serves as a good wake up call to every church leader who would discern this sign of the times. The lesson is simple. Church health is more important than church location.
Church health, as it relates to church growth, begins with stewardship. How are we managing the blessings and resources that God has given us? What kinds of intentional and well-designed processes are in place to care for every visitor that comes through our front doors? They represent 100% of your church’s future growth potential. What kind of integration processes are in place to onboard new leaders and move adherents from an unstable loose orbit into the core of the church? 80% of people who leave a church do so in the first year.
Mediocrity is guaranteed when these critical church health/growth processes are left to themselves with no intentional and ongoing determined focus from church leadership. We will have failed as co-workers of Christ if we do not do our part in caring for people. Christ completed His work on the Cross and the Holy Spirit is actively working in people’s hearts to bring them into participatory Kingdom life. Pastoring requires more than just proclamation of the message. Our part also requires that we exercise due diligence by implementing good processes that provide excellent outsider, visitor, newcomer and member care. We engage in an integral partnership with God to connect and move people into healthy Kingdom participation.
This brings us to the subject of systems. It takes very well designed and proven systems to support winning processes. Excellent systems can invisibly embed much of the workflow essential to good process management with no need for constant oversight. Process automation is a key to success in understaffed churches. Every pastor knows that it takes an inside knowledge, that can only be gained by years of successfully pastoring within a growing church, to really understand all of the dynamics involved in church growth. We consider this our key and unique contribution to the Kingdom at ConnectionPower.
ConnectionPower’s ministry management systems go far beyond a mere passive database to help you reorganize the chairs on the deck of the Titanic. We specialize in helping to lift churches into a sustainable growth pattern. I would encourage you, as we enter a new year of service to Christ, to take a good look, or another look, at our unique and award-winning connection (Velcro) and integration (gravity field) church software systems. We have unparalleled experience in working with thousands of churches over the past 25 years in the field of assimilation. The ongoing development of our web-based church management systems these past eight years have now brought us to the place where we win almost every bake-off with everyone else in the marketplace that are looking for full-featured, enterprise level solutions. Our churches often discover that the new families they initially connect to their church, covers the cost of our applications in perpetuity within the first quarter. May God bless you and your Christmas outreach efforts!
