Posts Tagged ‘church attendance’
10 Things That Ain’t Church (Some Thoughts On Irregular and Declining Church Attendance)
It’s never been easier to avoid church, skip church or exit church than it is today. And it has a lot of church leaders and Christians scrambling to figure out what’s happening, why it’s happening and what it all means. Those are great questions. On the positive side, a lot of the social stigma associated…
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5 Smarter Ways To Embrace Infrequent Church Attenders
It’s a challenge you face as a church leader: what do you do with people who only occasionally attend church? Like at Easter or Christmas or special occasions? But infrequent attendance isn’t just for holidays anymore. It’s for every day. How do you respond as people generally attend less often? You know…the couple who comes…
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3 New Realities About Church Attendance, Engagement, and Devotion
No secret—church attendance has fallen on hard times in the last several decades. Churches are closing, and even growing churches see people attending less often. How do you know how to lead when everything seems to be shifting all at once as North American culture becomes more post-Christian every year? For a few years now…
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10 Really Big Questions About Future Church Attendance (And 10 Hunches)
Talk to any church leader, and they’ll tell you it feels more challenging than ever to get people to come to church on a Sunday. Even in growing churches (like ours), the competition for peoples’ time, attention and devotion seems to get more intense every year. You’ve felt it too. So what’s up? And where…
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Declining Attendance and 7 Preaching Shifts That Are Happening Right Now
Every week you host services at your church hoping to reach more people, which is admirable and appropriate. The problem is that the culture is changing and never bothered to ask you permission. In many ways, preachers are using a method that’s been around for centuries…if not millennia…which on the one hand is wonderful. The…
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5 Things Millennials Are Looking For In a Church
One of the questions almost every church leader I know is asking is “How do we reach Millennials?”—that demographic of young adults now in their mid-twenties to age 40. It’s a great question. They’re hardly kids anymore. They’re today’s adults. And many churches have missed them altogether. One of the primary missions of every generation of church leaders…
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5 Reasons Why Engagement is the New Church Attendance
If you track attendance at your church (and who doesn’t), the vast majority of church leaders are tracking numbers that probably bother them. That can lead into a death spiral of trying to drive greater attendance, only to discover more disappointment down the road. The mission of the church is the same in every generation. But…
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7 Things That Will Drive Future Church Growth
You got into church leadership because you wanted to introduce people to Jesus. That’s pretty much how all of us begin, isn’t it? And yet every year, it seems to get harder to reach people. It’s not for lack of effort. Most church leaders try hard, pray hard and do their very best to advance…
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5 Ways Tracking Church Attendance Messes With Your Soul
If you’ve spent more than 10 minutes in church leadership, you’re aware of the tension that tracking church attendance creates inside you and around you. Sure, for starters, the way other leaders talk about numbers is an easy gateway for criticism (He’s totally obsessed with numbers). But it’s deeper than that. It’s easy to criticize…
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Why Attending Church No Longer Makes Sense
The trend is practically universal: fewer people are attending church every year. You might have even asked the question yourself. Why bother? There are many reasons why that’s happening (I outline 10 here), but I think it’s increasingly evident that it no longer makes sense to attend church. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge…
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