Path to Maturity

Yesterday I spent most of the day meeting with other pastors of new and growing churches.
First, it was an honor to be invited. With two weeks under our belt I was obviously the new guy. But the guys seemed to recognize that God is doing something with Connections.

We shared a lot about our stories- there is tons of wisdom in simply soaking up others experience. Then we had a brief discussion on leading our churches on path of maturity. I've read probably dozens of books and articles on the topic, but the discussion yesterday seemed refreshingly simply and insightful.

ENGAGING > CONNECTING > GROWING

That's what growing churches try to do.
So here's where we're at: statistically people will stick around a church as a visitor for 9 months. If they don't get connected in that period, they will drift off.

This means we have 81/2 months to get people connected! It turns out that this fits in exactly with our plan to formally launch our Connections (Home) Groups in the Fall of 2008. This also means that we can focus on Engaging for this season.

Our discussion lead to one definitive conclusion:
Nothing beats Word Of Mouth (WOM) to engage and attract people to church.
That said, there are some things we can do to try and promote our WOM factor:

1. Life-Change Stories. We have a few of these already. We've shared some in church, we've shared more in small groups. If you have a life-change story through Connections, we want to know, and with your permission, we want to celebrate!
2. Cool-Church Stories. All I can say here is that I think our church isn't just cool, but the coolest church ever! We meet in a theatre, the coffee is great, we give out popcorn. One guy came up to me after a service and said, "Any church that plays Linkin Park is the church for me!" How cool is that!
3. Advertising. This is a mystery, but just getting the word out that your church exists does create WOM. To this end we are hoping to create video spots that will actually be shown in the theatre before movies run.
4. Special Sundays. Two weeks in every service seems special. We celebrated our first service with an awesome lunch. We have a first communion service in the works. People have already asked about baptism. There will be special Sundays.
5. Program Buzz. Here we have nothing. The buzz is that we actually have a service going! Praise God.

Tomorrow- the path of Connecting.