Back in October, I was a guest on Carey Nieuwhof’s Leadership Podcast. During our conversation, we talked about how to diagnose a church attendance plateau or decline as a “front door” or a “back door” challenge.
I wrote a follow up post sharing a little more context around this topic. Here are a few key points from that article if you missed it:
- Your primary goal for first-time guests should be to get them to come back.
- A lot of churches think they have a back door problem because they see new people come, but they don’t take next steps to get involved. However, in reality, their number of first-time guests as a percentage of total attendance is very low, which means they actually have a front door problem.
- If your first-time guest numbers are lower than they should be, the obvious question you need to ask is this: Why have people stopped inviting their friends? We’ve found that churches creating environments that produce life-change won’t be able to stop their people from inviting friends.
Based on the interest, my team and I want to continue this conversation with a new series of articles. We’ll dig a little deeper into different “front door” and “back door” challenges churches may be facing, and discuss how to move forward in healthy ways.
Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss an article in the series. Stay tuned!
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