While my focus is on church health I like to analyse what helps a church grow.
All pastors want to grow a healthy church.
There are certain factors that improve church health while also positioning a church for growth.
1. The Mindset Shift
One of these factors is a mindset shift about church growth.
This is related to what I call the Churn Factor.
Try this exercise in a meeting to help your church members realize the Churn Factor is at play in their everyday world:
- Ask everyone to stand up
- Ask those who have moved house in the last 5 years to sit down
- Get everyone to look around and begin to realise people are highly mobile
- Then ask everyone still standing to sit down if they moved house in the last 10 years
- Trust me, not many people will be standing
- The churn factor is at play in your street, workplace and of course in your church.
How does this affect church growth?
Pastors and leaders get despondent about the lack of growth in their church. What they mean is why hasn’t our church become a mega church yet?
This despair is somewhat relieved when leaders discover the Churn Factor.
Here’s what it looks like.
If you have 100 people in your church and 15 left in the last 12 months you have a churn factor of 15%. This means you have to grow by 15% to just sustain your current church size.
Now growing by 15% every year is no mean feat.
When people discover the churn factor is normal part of modern living they understand that growing a church is not that easy, especially if your Churn Factor is 25% or more.
2. Well Trained Volunteers
I think another factor in growing a church is the upskilling of volunteers.
When your training is effective you produce confident people who enjoy their serving and willingly invite others to join their team.
These volunteers exude hope.
They love their church and their leaders because they have given them an opportunity to deploy their talents in specific ways.
There’s no doubt in my mind that hope-filled people are the best promotional tool in your church. They will attract others into the life of your church.
I’ve written previously about my preferred method of training which I call show and tell. You can read about it in my post How To Create A Volunteer Onboarding Process.
Download Volunteer Opportunity Template
Get more people serving, quicker
Use this method when training volunteers and their willingness to serve will improve and the benefits will become obvious to all.
3. Financial Investment in Your Pastor
Another key way to help your church grow is to invest financially in your pastor and their family.
Finance should be raised and utilised to send your pastor and their spouse to conferences and personal retreats that both equip and inspire. These events refresh vision and expose them to current best practices in the church world.
Financing coaching, and when needed, counselling fees should be normative in today’s pastoral world.
Also spend some dollars on resourcing your pastors with access to training products and all types of reading and audio materials.
While free resources can be garnered from podcasts and blogs you don’t want to be mean spirited about the resourcing of your pastors. Equip them and they will equip the church.
Why?
Pastoring today is more complex than what it was 10 – 15 years ago. Societal shifts and the online world have combined to significant complexity to the leader’s life.
Therefore resourcing your pastor’s life is mandatory and will benefit your entire church.
So there’s a few thoughts from me. What’s your one idea that helps a church grow?
