Growing the small church

Last night I met with the pastor and deacons of a small, rural church that averages about 20 people on Sunday morning. They have a very attractive facility with blacktop parking. The pastor has been serving this church for around five years, but they just can't seem to reach their community. One of my recommendations was to find out what the community needs from their church and find ways to provide that if possible. They wanted to know how to access that information. Their first thought was to go door-to-door, but that doesn't really work very well today. Instead, I suggested they invite people to the church for a community-wide party.

I suggested they select a date and invite the community to enjoy a fun-filled day at the church. Some things I recommended they think about was renting an air house the smaller children could bounce around in, setting up some bean bag tosses that seem so popular today, having home-made ice cream, and setting up an outdoor theatre for showing a movie after it got dark. To make this work they needed to not only invite the community, but every member had to attend and bring an unchurched friend or family member with them. As they were milling around the crowd they could ask people, "What do you think this community needs more than anything else?" They could get a sense of needed ministries in the church, people in the community would have a safe way to connect with the church, and everyone could have a good time.

Nearly every church claims they want to grow and can find many excuses why growth isn't happening. What they lack is a plan to grow, and a recent study has found that churches with a specific plan for growing the church was much more likely to grow than the church the just hopes growth would somehow occur. In other words, a church must be intentional if it truly wants to reach people. You can read several findings that came out of that study at http://fact.hartsem.edu/Press/churchgrowth.htm. It is a good study that should be helpful to stimulate some discussion in your church about some specific things your church might do to experience growth.