Reach & Retain Strategies (Part 3)
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In this episode of The Unstuck Church Podcast, Sean and Amy continue their series on reach and retain strategies, featuring a compelling conversation with Doug Dameron from Orchard Church in Brighton, CO about crafting effective next steps for new attendees.
What happens after someone makes a decision to follow Jesus at your church? Are your systems effectively connecting with new believers? Doug shares how his team transformed their follow-up process, leading to dramatic improvements in engagement – from just 5% of new believers becoming known to over 40% today.
Facts are our friends, not our enemies. This episode unpacks how one church used their data to drive strategic changes, resulting in a 600% increase in next steps engagement and a 300% growth in people taking action through serving, community, and baptism.
Listen in to discover:
- The power of digital follow-up in discipleship
- Why traditional connection methods might be failing your church
- How small “renovations” to your process can lead to exponential results
- Practical ways to remove barriers and increase engagement
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Transcript
Sean:
Before we start this week’s episode, I want to thank our podcast sponsor, The Church Lawyers. The Church Lawyers Client Membership program was created for organizations just like yours. Their team of legal professionals are personally called to empower and protect churches, ministries, and their leaders to fulfill their mission by providing biblically informed and ministry focused legal solutions. Whether governance, employment, litigation, or other matters, let The Church Lawyers walk alongside you as you navigate legal issues facing your ministry. Sign up for the Church Lawyers Client Member program today at thechurchlawyers.com. That’s the T-H-E church lawyers dot com.
Well, welcome to The Unstuck Church Podcast. I’m Sean here with my teammate Amy Anderson. Amy, as a Minnesotan, I bet you’re glad we’re in the middle of spring break because that means spring is almost here; actually, we’re just a few days away.
Amy:
Yes. I love that we’re heading into spring. Personally and professionally. Personally, I can get back outside to my garden, hang out on my porch. But professionally, Sean, I’m excited too because we’re going to be entering our cohort season. Over the next several months, we’re kicking off two executive pastor cohorts and one multi-site cohort. And I just think we just got off the calls from our cohort, a few minutes ago that we’ve been leading since last summer. And they are just such great experiences. It gives leaders the opportunity to get away for a few days to think about the ministry, not just kind of be consumed by it. They get connected with eight to 12 other like-minded leaders, and in that, we just learn from one another. We’re, you know, they share what’s working, they share what their challenges are. So, in fact, it’s worth mentioning that if you’re an executive pastor listening today, we have an executive pastor cohort coming up May 13th through the 15th in the Charlotte, North Carolina area. Transformation church is going to host us. That’s Derwin Gray.
Sean:
Great church.
Amy:
Such a great church. Great team. And at that gathering, just to look under the hood, we’re going to tee up conversations around strategic leadership, like how we close the gap between vision and execution. We’re going to be talking about staffing and structure best practices for building and leading the team. We’re going to talk about the relationship you have with your lead pastor and how to lead up. And help the lead pastor win more in their role and really a lot more. They are kind of like drinking from a fire hose, is the feedback, what we get. But, you know, we kick it off at that gathering where we’re in person, but then we nurture it over the next 12 months. That’s where we have our quarterly calls and kind of come back to some of the things that we learned and go a little deeper. So if that’s something you’re interested in, I just want to note that the deadline to register is April 1st, and I’m sure you can find that on our website.
Sean:
Yeah. You know, this is how I know those cohorts are helpful. Amy, we just, like you mentioned, we just got off a call with one of our XP cohort teams. And two people on that call. One that couldn’t be on last month’s call, one that was running late to this call, just said, I hate missing these calls. That’ how you know it’s helpful and it’s helpful, hopefully not just from our content, but to connect with other like-minded leaders.
Amy:
Absolutely. That’s right.
Sean:
Well, today we’re continuing our series on reach and retain strategies. In week one, we talked about how important it is to identify who you’re trying to reach in your mission field. Last week we talked about leveraging your big front door, your weekend service, and this week we’re going to talk about once we’ve reached people, what are some of the best practices we see related to actually retaining those people. So Amy, where do you want to start?
Amy:
Back in November, Sean, I received an email from our friend Doug Dameron. He’s the lead pastor at Orchard Church in Brighton, Colorado. And he was just excited. He wanted to share with me some amazing results that they’ve been getting after making some tweaks to their next steps processes, their engagement steps. And honestly, Sean, as you saw, the results were remarkable. I hopped on a call with him, and as he told me their story, I said, you have to share this with our listeners.
Orchard Church, they had been struggling with people making their start making it to their starting point class, which is basically the first thing they want new attenders to take, to get an overview of the church. They were struggling to put names to the people who were making decisions to follow Jesus. They know they had a lot more than ever came forward. And they were struggling getting people to take next steps to get into community. To serve. And these are struggles, Sean, that you and I, we hear all the time from the pastors we work with. So I hope you all enjoy this interview with Doug. I know there’s going to be some nuggets in there for everyone who’s listening. And then after the interview, Sean and I will share our biggest takeaways. So here’s my interview with Doug.
Well, my friend Doug, it’s great to be with you today. Before we dive into the content, just tell us a little bit about Orchard Church.
Doug:
Well, Orchard Church began literally in our apartment living room with our family of four in 2005 in July. So this July, we’ll mark our 20th anniversary at Orchard Church, which I can’t believe it. It is been amazing. And that’s how we started. We really just kind of parachuted into Denver. Didn’t know anyone. We’d never lived here. We weren’t from here. Had no friends, no family. So we literally started inviting people in our apartment complex to come to talk about the Bible and Jesus. And that’s how our core group was formed. And it just grew from there.
And we were portable for many years. We went from our apartment living room, we outgrew that in a couple of weeks, and we met in the clubhouse of our apartment complex. And we did that for about eight months. And then we moved to a rec center. We were there about six months, and then a brand new five A high school opened with a 600-seat auditorium. And it’s a whole God story.
There were actually six churches trying to get in this brand new amazing facility. And they put our names in a hat and they drew our name. It was like they casted lots. And the lot fell on us. And we met in that high school for 11 years, believe it or not. Set up, tear down, portable, the whole nine yards. Went from one service to two services to three services. And then we were able to build our first permanent facility, literally right next door to the high school. And we’ve been in that facility for about seven years now. We’ve gone from one location to three locations, and we’re just trying not to mess it up, because God has been doing amazing things and just trying to stay out of the way and hang on for the amazing ride. It’s been more than we could have ever dreamed or imagined. That’s for sure.
Amy:
Well, when I was talking to Shellie who oversees all of your next steps, she mentioned that you guys have been growing 15 to 20% a year this entire time. So I probably should have interviewed you on your reach strategies. You’re clearly reaching and reaching primarily the unchurched. But today I wanted to just to have you tell your story because when we spoke a few months ago, you shared about some changes and tweaks to engagement, to next steps to, and especially when people make that decision to follow Jesus and to become known. And so I just wanted you to share a little bit about that journey. Can you just share a little bit about what was not working that led you to go, we need to make some changes. What were some of the indicators in your lead pastor spirit that something wasn’t working?
Doug:
Wow. Amy, in 20 years, what was not working? How long do we have?
Amy:
No, I just mean the most recent changes.
Doug:
Okay, good. That would take all day, all the things not working. Well, our mission at Orchard Church is to be people helping people find and follow Jesus. And we really want to always see that balance between introducing someone to Jesus. That’s the finding Jesus and that decision and moment of faith that occurs. And then the rest of our focus is helping them to follow Jesus. We want a balance between our evangelism strategies and our spiritual formation strategies. And so we have always been really blessed at helping people find Jesus. We are in a community where 90% of the people around us claim no church affiliation whatsoever. Denver, Colorado is in the top five most unchurched metropolitan cities in the country, which is why God led us here. So we’ve always been about trying to help connect people who are far from God into a relationship with God.
So we average currently about 142 decisions of faith every single week. That’s our numbers this year so far. 142 a week. And I do an invitation every week. It’s not a come forward singing just as I am, but it’s a in your seat. Hey, you can make this decision. And then if you have made a decision for Christ, raise your hand so we can pray for you. We count those. We say at Orchard, we count people. Because people count, and every number has a name. It has a story. It matters to God, it matters to us. And so we see a lot of decisions. We realize some of those decisions, of those 142 are first time decisions of faith. Some of them are rededication of their faith. We estimate that about 50% of the people we’ve led to Christ are prior Catholics. And so some of them think they’re believers and then they realize, oh, I wasn’t, and now I am a believer.
And so we’re always trying to help them take their next step on their journey than once they found Jesus to follow Jesus. And we’ve done a lot of different things through the years to try to, okay, you’ve made this decision of faith. We want to come alongside of you and help you grow in your faith and disciple them. And they can be quick to make the decision, but not so quick to respond to giving information. Like, we trust Jesus, but we don’t trust you with our information. It’s a little bit of that.
And so back in the day, we kind of started out with a card in the seat, and we’d have a small percentage, maybe 5% actually fill that out. Then we started putting a table in the lobby and said, Hey, if you made a decision today, please stop by there and let them know that. And we’ve got some information. And we saw, again, about 3 to 5% of response to that. And then we got digital and we did the QR code. We put a QR code on the screen and we said, Hey, if you made a decision scan this QR code there, we would capture their information. We do things digitally. And we were seeing about 5% or so response to that. And just, you know, we weren’t okay with that. We weren’t okay with seeing only 5% of the decisions actually giving us information so we could follow up.
So then we started doing what we call, text the word Jesus to this number. So I put a number on the screen so the people in the room can see it, the people online can see it. And we say, if you made a decision today, please text the word Jesus to this number, and so we can continue to pray for you. And we saw about 10% of people, so at least double from five to 10% of the people that raised their hand that said they made a decision, gave us their information so we could follow up with them. We still weren’t satisfied with that, but it was a little bit better results than we had been seeing. And then I would always ask them to do that after we would kind of, I would pray for them and I’d say, Hey, let’s kind of wrap up. Let’s celebrate. Well, we all know as soon as we celebrate and do that, everybody starts checking out. They’re getting their stuff together. They’re thinking about getting their kids the ball game lunch and all that. And that was the moment I would ask them to do that.
And so we had this idea, well, what if you did it as part of the invitation in that moment. When God is working in their heart, they’re more focused. There aren’t their distractions. And I made that simple little change right after. I would ask them to raise their hand. If they made a decision, I would say, Hey, I’m going to pray for you, but before I pray for you, I’m going to ask you to do something for me. And I say, as we just continue with heads, bow and eyes closed, those of you that just made that decision and raised your hand, would you just look up here at me? And I start making eye contact. I say, I’m going to pray for you. But would you just, right now, in this moment, take out your cell phone and text the word Jesus to this number on the screen while I’m praying for you so we can pray, continue praying for you in the days ahead by name, and send you some digital resources to help you on your faith journey. And that little change, we went from 10% of people that had raised their hand responding to 40%. It was a massive, massive jump.
Amy:
Wow. That’s a huge change.
Doug:
Just by that one little change in the moment where the spirit was moving before the distractions happened. So it was pretty amazing.
Amy:
And when you originally told me this story, Doug, one thing that you said in, if it’s not true, don’t say it. But what I recall is that moment when they were looking at you, you actually affirmed their decision and you told them like you believed they made that decision. Can you just say a little bit to that pastoral piece there?
Doug:
Yeah. So I just try to make eye contact with some people, as many as I can. And I say, Hey, I believe you were serious about that decision. You meant that. And I’m kind of nodding my head, and they’re nodding their head. And I’ll say, and you know what? We believe you meant that. And we are serious about helping you not only find Jesus, but to follow Jesus. So I’m gonna ask you to do this right now.
Amy:
That’s it.
Doug:
Just try to make it really personal. And I look into the camera as well, talking to those online. Our online responses have gone up like 300% as well. They can text Jesus as well in that way. So it’s just amazing what one little adjustment, the difference that it can make. We often say around our team that we gotta be masters of midcourse correction. And just that one little correction. We’ve seen exponential results from it. It’s been pretty exciting.
Amy:
Well, and this is the culture that I love that you’ve said at Orchard Church. Even Shellie, when I was talking with her, I told her, I’m so proud that you hold so loosely to your methods. Because I’ve known you for years now. You’re always watching the results and you care more about results than any ministry strategy play that you’re running. So that midcourse correction is so much part of your DNA, and it’s why you’re seeing the results you are. So that was a great example of one little tweak. And I am assuming now that you’ve got more people that you’re connected with that said yes to Jesus, how are the results after that? Are you retaining more people and being able to help them follow Jesus? What are you seeing on the other side of those numbers?
Doug:
Oh, absolutely. Because when they text the word Jesus to the number, we get their information again. So we can pray for them by name, and then we start sending them, it’s all automated. I’m not the tech guru on how we automate that. I got somebody else that does that. But they receive immediately a text congratulating them on their decision. And then we have five videos that they received. They’re eight to 10 minutes long. Many of them were filmed by myself. My wife, some of the others on our team, just walking through the basics of faith, the decision making sure they understand the decision that they made, their next step of getting baptized and what that means, how to pray, how to read your Bible. And we’re sending a lot of digital resources that they can follow up with.
And we’ve seen so many people taking those next steps now and being discipled through those digital avenues. We give them an opportunity if they wanna meet with somebody individually as well. But most people, they just kind of self-identify and start using those resources and tools that we send them. And I would say there’s hardly a week that goes by that I don’t have someone in the lobby. I always make myself available in the lobby afterward, Hey, come by. If you’re newer, I’d love to meet you that says, Hey, I watched all those videos. Thank you. They felt like you were talking right to me. And that helped me so much. I’ve started reading my Bible. I’ve started praying. I’m getting baptized at the next baptism. I’m in a small group now. I’m serving. So it’s working. It really is working.
Amy:
So Doug, another part of your story. So you made these tweaks to text Jesus when people are new followers. But if I remember right, you weren’t seeing great attendance, people getting engaged at what you maybe called your starting point class. Just again as a lead pastor, what triggered you to re-engineer that process?
Doug:
Well, it’s the data. We believe facts are our friends and they help us make informed decisions. And we weren’t seeing the amount of people taking next steps to the degree that we were seeing growth in our church. We grow about 20, 23% a year, and we had all these new people, but we weren’t seeing that volume actually going beyond the Sunday service. And so we said, what can we do? And we went from offering a one hour starting point class once a month to next step experience every service, 15 minutes. And Shelly shared some of the growth there. It’s just been amazing. Exponential. We went from about 125 people in eight months to over 800 people in six months doing the 15 minutes. Just being willing to make that change to help people take those next steps.
Amy:
And did I get my numbers right? So obviously that’s the first engagement step there. But because of that change, not only did they take your engagement step, but because of that change, you saw a 335% increase in people actually taking the big next steps of getting in a group or serving, giving. Is that correct?
Doug:
That’s correct. Right. It’s not enough just that they show up to the next step experience and get their free crumble cookie that we give them. We don’t want them to just show up. We want them to take a next step. And we saw 300% people that went to next step experience actually take a next step. And I think a lot of it had to do with the volume because more people were going.
Amy:
I’m just curious, Doug, just church wide as we end this overall, what do you think makes Orchard Church so sticky that not only are they coming, but they stay around? What’s your thoughts on that?
Doug:
That’s a great question. I’ll just tell you what, when we ask people that question, what brought you to Orchard? What has kept you at Orchard? And the number one response that we overwhelmingly receive is, you guys keep it real. They say, you guys are just, you are what you are. You keep it real. You’re authentic, you’re relatable. I can understand it. I can access it. That’s the number one reason people tell us – the authenticity.
Amy:
So, pastor Doug, any encouragement you’d like to leave with the pastors and the ministry leaders who are listening today?
Doug:
Well, I would say some encouragement and a challenge, if I could take it just a little bit further. My encouragement would be to have a balance in your church of helping people find Jesus and follow Jesus. There’s been a lot of studies that have come out recently that most churches are spending 80, 85% of their focus and energy and resources on discipling and helping people grow spiritually. And certainly that is part of what we are supposed to be doing. But I think we gotta get back to more of a balance between the evangelism strategies and the spiritual formation strategies. I know in Unstuck Group, we talk about that all the time, that there needs to be a balance in those. Barna just recently came out with a study where pastors themselves admitted that 99% of the pastors in this study said that they believed their church was ineffective in evangelism. That’s staggering.
Amy:
Oh, that is awful.
Doug:
99% of pastors admitted they’re ineffective in evangelism. And Jesus said he came to seek and to save the lost. And I think we need to follow that example. And so I’m really passionate about encouraging and challenging and helping churches get back to giving people that opportunity. We can’t make a disciple till somebody first becomes a disciple and says yes to Jesus. And so I’m not saying this is the right way to do it, but one of the things we’re known for at Orchard Church is we give an invitation every service every week. And we see response from that every week. And it builds into the culture of our church that our people know that if I invite my friend, neighbor, coworker, family member, business partner, if I invite them and they don’t know Jesus, they’re at least gonna hear the gospel and have an opportunity to respond. I recently did a series on finances and giving, and we saw over 300 people say yes to Jesus in that series.
Amy:
That’s great.
Doug:
Because God’s the greatest giver. He gave his son so that we can have everlasting life. It’s easy, and people said yes, but it’s just built into the culture and people expect it.
Sean:
Well, Doug is such a high energy guy. I love his passion around reaching people. 142 on average decisions to follow Jesus each week—that is fantastic.
Amy:
Amazing.
Sean:
And his passion around helping people take their next step. So Amy, I just want to know what stood out to you from that conversation?
Amy:
No surprise here. I think one of the things that really stood out is that, and they know this, your data at church, when you go through vital signs, when you pay attention to your data, it’s telling you a story about your ministry strategies. You know, for Doug and his team related to people becoming known after making a decision to follow Jesus. You heard him, we had a 5% response of those 142 who raised their hands when we did an analytical connect card. Literal paper and pencil. So then they tried a table in the lobby. It was three to 5% people of them stop by. They tried a digital QR code and they got 10%, but they weren’t okay with that. And the muscle that they’ve developed is that when they aren’t seeing the results they want, they put a spotlight on their strategies, and they make changes.
And that’s what we all need to remember. Our data is telling us a story about what’s working and what’s not. And in Doug’s case, their strategy, whether it was the card, the table, the QR code, it wasn’t producing the results they desired, and they needed to renovate their strategy. And in this example, it was a small renovation, but look at the results. Today, 40% of the people who make decisions on the weekend are now sharing that decision with them, and they’re now receiving digital resources to help them begin their discipleship journey. And if you caught it, online they have a 300% increase in the people who are becoming known. So pay attention to your data.
My second takeaway, and it’s related, is that mid-course corrections can lead to exponential results. Doug touched on this briefly, but let me just recap how they tweak their first step of engagement, why they course corrected. So again the data was telling a story. Their church was growing faster than people engaging in next steps. And by the way, Sean, that’s what the latest Unstuck Church Report is telling you about the big C church right now.
Sean:
Exactly.
Amy:
Front door numbers are healthy and growing. We’ve had 11 quarters in a row of double digit average growth at churches, but people taking next steps has kind of flatlined. So at Orchard Church, the first step they wanted people to take was to go to a one hour class that was offered once a month after the first service. Then they called it Starting Point. But it wasn’t well attended anymore, especially post-Covid. So they shifted to a 15 minute experience after every service, and they called it the Next Steps Experience. So they even rebranded it and because it was shorter and more accessible, and they served crumble cookies. Because who doesn’t want a crumble cookie?
Sean:
Right.
Amy:
But out of that shift, out of that experience, the people who attended got enrolled into a digital campaign where once a week for five weeks, they received a video of the next steps they can take that would help them learn to follow Jesus. And here’s what’s happened. They saw a nearly 600% growth in the number of people who went through the experience. In other words, for anyone who is math challenged, if a hundred people went before, now 600 people were going.
Sean:
Way to break that down to make it easy for us. Thank you.
Amy:
You know, those are just tremendous results. And as Doug said, because they had more people go through that next steps experience, they actually saw over 300% growth in people who actually took a big next step to serve, to get into community. So, if anyone wants to hear more about the changes they made, we did interview Shellie Dameron, who is the executive director of ministry on our webinar last week. And if you want to watch that interview, you can find it in the Unstuck Learning Hub. But she gives it, she’s over that area. She’s the architect of it. So she gave us a little bit more detail in everything they were doing. So I encourage you to do that if you want more information. But Sean, just quickly, anything that stood out to you.
Sean:
One thing that came to mind was just the number of churches I’ve talked to that have struggled in the last few years at getting people to engage in serving specifically but also for some churches in groups. And I just had a wonder is part of it because those first steps, like you talked about, not the big next steps, but those first steps are too difficult in their church. So I think that’s one thing churches need to analyze.
Amy:
Let me jump in on that. Again, this was from our webinar last week, but the results that they saw after they made this change, and here’s the real math, they had eight to 10 people a month going to the starting point class. And now they were having between 80 and a hundred per month going to the next steps experience. That’s the real math. And at the end of the year, when I talk about that 335% jump, it was a 70% increase in new volunteers, and it was like a 33% increase overall in the number of volunteers. So I know so many of our listeners are struggling with serving, that’s flatlined. And I agree with you. We have to look for that first connection point.
Sean:
I also was surprised to learn that Denver is in the top five most unchurched metropolitan cities. So I really appreciate the intentionality and how Doug and his team are leading ministry. I was also a little bothered by the Barna data he shared at the end. If it’s true that 99% of pastors feel that they are ineffective with evangelism, we might need to invite him back to talk about how Orchard is reaching so many people with the gospel in the Denver area. And then my last takeaway, Amy, was, Doug’s in Denver in the Denver area, and he shared those nuggets with us. So those are the Denver nuggets for today’s podcast.
Amy:
Can you put a sound effect with that?
Sean:
I could try the rim shot or something. Not everyone’s gonna like my sense of humor. All right, Amy, let’s wrap on that note. Let’s wrap up today, any final thoughts for today’s conversation?
Amy:
Your data’s telling you a story. So what story is your data telling you? If you don’t know your data, you need to – like Doug said in the interview, facts are our friends. In fact, this is so important that we’re going to offer our podcast listeners free access to our Vital Signs Assessment over this next month. So this assessment will help you evaluate your church’s health. It’s packed with benchmarks from the analysis of thousands of churches nationwide. So not only will you see your result, but you’ll see how you compare to the benchmarks in over 15 areas. We always say there’s no single number that can tell the whole story of a church’s health. And that’s why we like to look at this set of metrics in combination with one another. That’s what’s going to give you a truer look at where you have strengths and opportunities. So if you don’t know your data, take advantage of this free offer. And then specifically to our topic today, I want you to reflect what part of your next steps, more specifically, your engagement strategy, is not producing the results you want because your data’s telling you it’s time to renovate. So identify that and have a conversation about it with your team.
Sean:
Absolutely. So to get access to the Vital Signs Assessment and get a snapshot of your church’s health today, you’re going to go to theunstuckgroup.com, and search on the top of our website. Just go to the Learning Hub to sign up for Learning Hub Access. And here’s the free code to get access to one month free in order to take our Vital Signs Assessment. It is the number one and the word month Free Learning Hub. So the number one month Free Learning Hub (1monthfreelearninghub). You use that coupon code at checkout, and you can get access to the Learning Hub and the Vital Signs Assessment that’s included there.
We use this Vital Signs assessment as part of our health assessment process in our unstuck process as we help churches clarify where they are today and build a plan for where God wants them to be tomorrow. And as you go through your vital signs data, if something looks off, if something looks unhealthy or maybe things look very healthy and you just want to think about, God, where are you calling us in this next season? We’d love to come alongside you and partner to help you determine what those steps might look like. So you can start a conversation with us on that same site, theunstuckgroup.com today. Next week, we’re back with one last episode in this series. We’re going to wrap it up. Until then, we hope you have a great week.
