One trend almost every church leader is talking about today: people who attend church are attending less often.
This podcast episode is the second part of a 5 part series on why people are attending church less often.
Part 1: 10 Reasons Even Committed Church Attenders Are Attending Less Often
Part 2: CNLP Episode 23: Why People Are Attending Church Less Often—An Interview with Will Mancini.
Part 3: 5 Ways to Embrace Infrequent Church Attenders
Part 4: 10 Predictions About the Future Church And Shifting Attendance Patterns
If you want to access the podcast interviews easily on your phone or other device, the best way is to subscribe to my leadership podcast for free on iTunes or Stitcher.
In this episode, however, Will Mancini walks us through the trend of declining attendance and helps us see how to respond and how NOT to respond as this new reality unfolds around us. The interview is full of insights for everyone wondering why people aren’t coming to church as often anymore.
Welcome to Episode 23 of the Podcast.
Guest Links
The Most Important Trend in 2015 and What to do About it
Free Book Download
You can download the first four chapters of Will’s book, Innovating Discipleship, for free here.
If you want to buy the full book, you’ll find it here.
Links Mentioned in this Episode
The Orange Conference/SeniorLeader
The Cove Church Vision (Note…watch the Reach series)
Dave Browning at Christ the King
Ryan Russell at XXXChurch; Episode 14
FaithBridge Church (Post-Sermon Bonus Videos)
3 Things You Can Do Right Away
If you’re trying to respond to the reality that people are attending church less often, here are three practical responses:
1. Decide to run offence. This is a mindset shift. But rather than just try to figure out how to get people to come back, figure out how to do ministry to them wherever they are. Shift from scarcity to abundance thinking. This is part of the dialogue I started on the blog with this post on reasons why people who attend church are attending less often.
2. Define your outputs. Most churches only measure input but never measure outputs. For example, what’s your definition of a committed follower of Jesus? Second, is your current system producing it? Another example might be to try to get people to engage God’s word personally. So survey people and ask…how many times a week are you meaningfully engaging God’s word? Nationally, 22% say it’s every day. What if, after some intense focus, 50% of your people did. Those measured outputs provide value, and when you identify the value, attendance has a habit of taking care of itself.
3. Move from being a teaching center to a training center. Give yourself more leadership bandwidth to create more tools and value around the content of your ministry. If you’re helping people develop new life outcomes, and if there’s modeling, training, evaluation and accountability around anything new for the life of following Jesus, that’s something that can’t be replaced. As people travel more, they can bring the mission with them wherever they go.
Again, join us on the blog this week and next week for more on this subject.
Quotes from Will
You can have more engagement in a well-done online service than a typical mega-church. @willmancini Click To Tweet No brick and mortar church had a better follow up for me than @lifechurchtv online. @willmancini Click To Tweet Much of what we experience on Sunday morning can be delivered digitially. @willmancini Click To Tweet We can play defence with declining church attendance, or we can play offence. @willmancini Click To Tweet Look at the future church with an abudance mindset, not a scarcity mindset. @willmancini Click To Tweet 95% of American churches only play defence when it comes to declining attendance. @willmancini Click To Tweet 'How many 2 a.m. friends do you have?' is a great discipleship question. @willmancini Click To Tweet Church leaders need to stop measuring only inputs and start measuring outputs. @willmancini Click To Tweet CNLP 023: Why People Are Attending Church Less Often And How to Respond—An Interview with Will Mancini Click To TweetA New Episode Every Week…Just Subscribe
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Next Episode: David Kinnaman
We continue this series on church attendance and engagement next week with David Kinnaman, President of the Barna Group.
David discusses his recent finding on the massive national poll that discovered that 48% of millennials fit the category of being churchless, both in their attendance and their mindset.
What does it mean to be the church in a post-Christian culture? David has some incredible insights.
Subscribe for free now, and you won’t miss Episode 24.
