August 30, 2023

New Church Data & Trends: Q3 2023 Unstuck Church Report – Episode 311 | The Unstuck Church Podcast

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    Quarterly Unstuck Church Report

Ministry Insights from the Q3 2023 Unstuck Church Report

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Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles all the data we’ve collected to monitor trends in churches in the United States. For this quarter’s report, we only included churches that provided data between July 14 and August 2, 2023. 

We received survey responses from 288 churches that ranged in size from under 100 to over 8,000 in physical attendance for worship gatherings. The average in-person attendance of churches that participated was 623 people. This provides a very current snapshot of ministries of all shapes and sizes.

Q3 2023 DATA & MINISTRY TRENDS

If you measure and monitor the right numbers, it’ll help you make better decisions. A data point by itself doesn’t tell you much, but that data point tracked over time and compared to other metrics can begin to tell a story.

In this episode, Amy and I unpack the “story” this quarter’s data is telling as well as some of the key findings from the Q3 2023 report:

  • New data on in-person and online attendance
  • Benchmarks for next steps and ministry engagement
  • Updated giving and staffing trends
  • Insights from Christian Financial Resources
Monitoring the right numbers helps us better decisions. A data point by itself doesn’t tell you much, but the same data point tracked over time and compared to other metrics can begin to tell a story. [episode 311] #unstuckchurch Share on XChurch attendance has largely recovered, but church engagement is still lagging. People have come back for Sunday services, but they still are not connecting with other people in groups and on serving teams. [episode 311] #unstuckchurch Share on XIf 2021 and 2022 were about getting people to come back to church, 2023 needs to be about reconnecting people to other people. [episode 311] #unstuckchurch Share on XOn average, churches have more than enough cash reserves and very little debt. It seems that there is financial margin for churches to begin making some bold moves to accomplish the Gospel mission. [episode 311] #unstuckchurch Share on X

This report includes special financial and staffing insights from Christian Financial Resources, such as:

“Staffing for growth may put staffing expenses slightly higher than the 50% mark, which should even out as the church grows. However, staff reductions could be required if the necessary growth doesn’t happen. So, plan accordingly and consider the impact additional employees will make in the first year and for years to come.”

Subscribe to the Quarterly Unstuck Church Report:


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This Episode is Sponsored by Christian Financial Resources:

Since 1980, Christian Financial Resources (CFR) has financed more than 950 ministry projects for independent churches in the United States. As your church grows, CFR is equipped to support your vision and your ministry with financial services tailored to meet the needs of independent churches—including capital campaigns, stewardship services, and loans for construction, building purchase, or real estate acquisition.

As your ministry continues to grow, consider how CFR can help your church cultivate a generosity mentality and raise more capital for your next project. Click here to learn more.


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Transcript

Sean (00:02):

Welcome to The Unstuck Church Podcast, where each week we are exploring what it means to be an unstuck church. Every quarter, The Unstuck Group releases fresh data on churches, as well as some key learnings in The Unstuck Church Report. On this week’s podcast, Tony and Amy share their thoughts on what we’re learning from the data about attendance, discipleship, staffing and finances. If you’re new to the Unstuck Church Podcast, before you listen, stop and go to theunstuckgroup.com/podcast to subscribe to get the episode show notes in your email. When you do, you’re gonna get resources to support each week’s episode, including our Leader Conversation Guide and access to our podcast resource archive. Again, that’s theunstuckgroup.com/podcast to subscribe. Now, before we get into this week’s conversation, here’s a word from Tony.

Tony (00:54):

Is your church contemplating the idea of constructing or expanding its facility? Engaging in a capital campaign facilitated by Christian Financial Resources can greatly assist your ministry as you embark on a transformative journey of stewardship. CFR stands ready to help accelerate your church’s vision and ministry by offering tailored financial services specifically catered to independent churches. By partnering with CFR on your capital campaign, your church will benefit from personalized coaching and a guided roadmap. If you want to grow generosity in your church and raise funds for your next capital project, reach out today by visiting CFRministry.org.

Amy (01:42):

Well, welcome back to The Unstuck Church Podcast. Today, we’re gonna be talking about the freshly released edition of The Unstuck Church Report. And, Tony, when we focus on the data in these quarterly reports, we hear a lot of positive feedback from pastors. It sounds like they find real value in learning about what other churches are experiencing.

Tony (02:00):

Yeah, I think you’re right, Amy. In fact, now we have about 10,000 subscribers to The Unstuck Church Report every quarter. If you’re not subscribed, if you’re listening and you’re not subscribed, you can go to theunstuckgroup.com/trends, and you, too, could be a part of those church leaders that are getting this fresh report every quarter. For this quarter’s report, we had nearly 300 churches participate in the survey. So, this is a lot of data from churches under a hundred in attendance to churches over 8,000 in attendance. And we, we captured this just recently, so this is fresh data from just a couple weeks in late July. And so, I love this because not only do we have a lot of information to look at, but it’s coming from the summer. So, this is, these are really current trends, Amy, and if you’re subscribed to The Unstuck Church Report, you will receive a reminder every quarter to refresh your data. And, of course, the more churches that participate, the more detailed we can get in the analysis going forward. So, if you want more data about churches similar to yours, you need to participate and you need to encourage your friends at similar churches to do that as well.

Amy (03:19):

Well, that is a great response. And you know, at The Unstuck Group, we learned long ago that if you measure and monitor the right numbers, it’ll help you make better decisions. One data point by itself doesn’t tell you much, but the data point tracked over time and compared with other metrics can begin to tell a story. So, Tony, before we get into some of the specific trends, what’s the story you’re seeing in the current data?

Tony (03:43):

Yeah, Amy, this is a combination of what we’re seeing in the data, but I, I mean, just to be honest, this is also a reflection of the conversations that I’ve been having with, almost daily, with pastors and church leaders. So this is what I’m seeing. These are kind of the big trends if you will. First of all, people are meeting Jesus, and I’m very encouraged by the number of people who have made decisions to follow Jesus by indicating salvation or baptism just in this last year. So I think a lot of this may have been kind of pent up during Covid, certainly as our church in the seasons where our churches were closed or meeting primarily online. But it was, it was exciting to see that, on average, a church with a thousand people in attendance celebrated 100 people crossing the line of faith in the last 12 months.

Amy (04:35):

Wow.

Tony (04:36):

And that’s a huge win.

Amy (04:39):

That’s huge.

Tony (04:39):

Maybe the second big trend is that church attendance has largely recovered, but church engagement is lagging. So, in other words, people have come back to Sunday services, but they’re still not connecting for some reason to other people, either in groups or on serving teams. And again, I’m hearing that from pastors, but the data is showing that as well. And we’re gonna unpack that in a moment. That may be why churches are investing heavily in staffing, and that’s a third big trend that we’re seeing right now.

Amy (05:14):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (05:15):

Churches are more likely to be overstaffed, and churches are hiring more people—maybe because fewer people are volunteering. I’m not sure, and if churches hire more people, will that make it less likely that people will volunteer? So it almost becomes a chicken and egg scenario, so I’m not sure which is driving which. But the fact is churches seem to be investing more in staff in this season. A fourth trend that I’m seeing: churches, for the most part, continue to remain healthy financially. In fact, on average, churches have more than enough cash reserves and very little debt. And it seems like churches have financial margin for making some of the bold moves that are necessary to accomplish our gospel mission. And then, maybe the last big trend that I am seeing, Amy, is nearly half of the churches who have taken our Unstuck Church Assessment in the last year self-identified that they are in the maintenance phase of the church life cycle.

Amy (06:23):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (06:23):

And, just bottom line on that, that’s way too many churches to be in maintenance mode right now.

Amy (06:29):

Right.

Tony (06:29):

And if there’s anything we can do to encourage churches to get back to the healthy side of the church life cycle where they’re reaching more people and encouraging more people to take their next steps towards Christ, I wanna, that’s the mission I wanna be on.

Amy (06:47):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (06:47):

And honestly, that’s one of the reasons why I love doing this conversation around what we’re seeing, the trends we’re seeing in churches because we can highlight where we’re seeing health, where we’re seeing success, if you will, when it comes to carrying out our mission. But we can also point to some specific areas where we can be taking some next steps when it comes to our ministry and helping people meet and follow Jesus.

Amy (07:14):

You know, Tony, you said that you’ve, you’ve seen this in the churches you’re working with, the conversations with pastors. Do you just have any specific stories you could share?

Tony (07:23):

Yeah, so, actually, there are a number of recent stories that we’re hearing from churches that The Unstuck Group has served either in the past or we’re currently serving. One example of this, John, who’s the senior pastor at Quest Church in Augusta, Georgia, emailed just this past week. And, by the way, we started working with John and his team back in 2017. But he’s, and this is what he shared with me this past week. He said we had over 1,100 people and three services today, and that’s the highest non-special Sunday ever. , if you were to take out all the Easter services and Christmas Eve services that they’ve done in the past, that’s the most people that they’ve ever had at their church on a normal Sunday.

Amy (08:12):

Wow.

Tony (08:12):

And it’s about 300 more people, on average, than they had the same time last year. So they’re experiencing a lot of growth. John said they launched student ministry tonight for the fall, and by the way, they have a, a new student pastor. The student pastor must be doing his or her job because they had over 130 students show up, which is the highest number they’ve ever had on a Sunday night. So it’s an indication that the church is reaching a younger generation of families. So I love that.

Amy (08:42):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (08:43):

And, in addition, he said we celebrated 10 baptisms today. And I’m excited about this. They’re, they’ve been really intentional in recent years about becoming a truly multicultural church. And John said, on average, they’re seeing more than 20% of people attending their church are not reflective of, of the primary ethnicity in their community. So, for them, primarily a white population, and so they’re seeing 20% of their attendance, they’re non-white. And so that’s, that’s exciting, as well, because this is something I know they’ve been working hard at. But this is how John wrapped up his email. He said, “I share all this because The Unstuck Group is a part of our success,” which made me feel good. “It’s the ongoing coaching and consulting that keeps us on track and keeps us moving forward. And so when people ask me,” this is what John said, “when people ask me about our growth, I always am sure to tell them that having a coach is a part of this.” And most folks don’t expect that answer and honestly aren’t willing to invest the money and time in it. But he said it pays off in a huge way. And so he said, “I wrapped up by saying, I just, I wanna take a moment at the end of this incredible Sunday to say thank you. I really appreciate you and what you do.” So, thanks, John, for sharing that update. And it’s just fun to see what’s happening in some of the churches that we get to work with, Amy.

Amy (10:17):

That’s so exciting. And I also like how it illustrates, you mentioned, we started working with them in 2017. You know, this is never a 12-month process.

Tony (10:27):

Right.

Amy (10:27):

It, you know, the first year is pretty intense, just getting everything organized, but then, it’s that consistent working your plan that is, is what propels you, you know, from the right side of that life cycle back to the left. And, Tony, since we’re on that topic of attendance growth, why don’t we talk more about how churches are reaching new people. What did you learn as you reviewed where churches stand at this point?

Tony (10:50):

Well, again, good news here. A lot of good news. On average, weekly attendance across all survey churches increased more than 20% year-over-year. So that’s very encouraging, especially because now at this point, Amy, we’re looking at kind of post-pandemic numbers last summer-

Amy (11:11):

Yes.

Tony (11:11):

And comparing it to where the church is this summer. So for, for the average church to be experiencing 20% growth year-over-year is just fantastic. Specifically, on that note, churches over a thousand are growing faster right now than smaller churches, but all churches are experiencing attendance, attendance increase. And, specifically, churches over a thousand are seeing it’s a 27% year-over-year increase in attendance. While churches under 200, again, they’re still growing, but it’s at a little bit slower pace. They’re seeing a 13% year-over-year increase. You may be interested not just in adult attendance but more specifically with kids and students. The year-over-year increase for kids attendance was up 16%. For students, student attendance was up 12%. So both are growing, but both seem to be growing a little bit slower than adult attendance. And, Amy, I think that’s an interesting shift because both children’s ministry and student ministry attendance growth, they’re now lagging behind adult worship attendance growth, and we didn’t see that in the early months following the pandemic. At that point, it seemed that more young families with kids and students were returning to in-person gatherings compared to adults without kids. And because of that in those early months after the pandemic, we were seeing higher percentage of growth with kids and students rather than adults.

Amy (12:51):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (12:51):

Last thing I’ll share here is that larger churches really are leaning into multisite strategy. In fact, more than half of the churches that have an average attendance of a thousand or more people in attendance are now multisite. So it, it really is the primary way that larger churches are continuing to reach more people for Jesus.

Amy (13:14):

Mm-hmm. Yeah. Tony. And given the increase in attendance, you know, in person at the gatherings, people might be interested in learning what online engagement looks like at this point. What does the data indicate there?

Tony (13:24):

Yeah, a couple of things, Amy. First, engagement with online services continues to decline. That’s not a surprise. The average number of online service views, and to try to create apples-to-apples data across all the churches that we’re looking at, we ask churches, and this is a very minimal amount of engagement, but just tell us how many people viewed your services either live or on-demand, one minute or more per week. Is that sufficient to actually get to, to experience worship? Absolutely not.

Amy (13:58):

No.

Tony (13:59):

But, that, we’re trying to create apples-to-apples information across churches. And by using that comparison, we know that online service engagement, those views, they’re down about 5% year-over-year. But that decline is slowing from what we were seeing in the data back six or 12 months ago. So, in other words, that decline is starting to slow, and the fact that the decline in online service views is starting to slow is likely a confirmation now, at this point, most people who are watching online have now returned to in-person attendance. Good news. And, in fact, my hope is that we will start to see these numbers for online engagement begin to move in a positive direction because we know that online services tend to be an initial step for people who will eventually attend in-person gatherings for the very first time.

Tony (15:02):

Well, around this topic today, we wanted to share a quick word from Darren Key, who is the CEO of our report sponsor this quarter, Christian Financial Resources. Darren, one of the data points we saw in this quarter’s report is that churches, on average, have the equivalent, equivalent of almost six months in cash reserves. And well, that’s, that’s well beyond the number we typically recommend, which is two to three months. And I know, Darren, that you’ve said you actually recommend a similar goal around 13 weeks of cash on hand. So when you see the data showing that churches have so much cash wrapped up or just kind of sitting on the sidelines at this point, what does that indicate to you?

Darren (15:42):

So I think one thing is it, it can sometimes mean churches have some money set aside for various projects is what we’re seeing ’cause we’ve got hundreds of partner churches. And we’re seeing several of them that they’ve had projects on delay since COVID, and they’re starting to build up that cash for that. Others, you know, it has been, they’ve gotten PPP. They’ve got employee retention credit, so they’re sitting on excess reserves there. It could be for some of them, what they’re gonna want to do is actually use some of those dollars if they have debt to pay down their debt because one of the things we’re gonna talk about here in just a moment is they may start to see some real increases on their debt service.

Tony (16:20):

Yeah. And with that, in the report, we did also note that churches right now, and this is a good thing based on what we’re about ready to talk about, have little debt overall. And that’s a good thing because, as you mentioned, interest rates have really climbed in the last 12 months. My kids are no, are seeing that too as they’re thinking about trying to buy their first homes. But for churches that may be considering a new initiative or a building project, you said that an alternative to taking on new debt would be to utilize a capital campaign to pay off existing debt or to use the new funding to save for future projects. So could you give a piece of advice or two for churches who might be considering a capital campaign in the coming months?

Darren (17:02):

Yeah, a lot of churches, I think, first of all, you said a great thing there, Tony, that they need to be prepared for if they have a loan that’s about to reprice this year or next year, they may be in for a real big shock because prime rate had since the Great Recession until last year was running between 3.25 and 5.5. So there’s a lot of churches that find their loans at that. Well, prime rate as of the day of this recording is 8.5% and may be even going up a little bit more from there. And so churches that are working on their 2024 budget need to really plan for that. So we’re encouraging a lot of our partner churches right now to consider doing a vision campaign for a debt reduction and that they could do that in the fall, in the winter or in the spring. Those are the kind of the three seasons to do it. Because every dollar that they can pay down on that debt, that’s dollars they’re freeing up for ministry and missions. We also have some churches that do special appeals a lot of times in quarter four because that’s obviously the heaviest quarter in giving for most churches. And so they’re actually gonna even focus on that to their congregation, and say, “Hey, every dollar you give is gonna go toward actually paying down our debt, which is gonna save us X number of dollars over some period of time. And, you know, a lot of people in our churches have been through, you know, Financial Peace University or Compass, and they love the idea of seeing churches pay down their debt. So it that for some people they don’t care, but for some people in your churches, it’s a high motivator for them. So, Tony, one other thing to talk about is if your church wants to talk about a capital campaign, a vision campaign, feel free to reach out to our ministry at cfrministry.org or call our ministry. And we’d love to see if we can help your church with that.

Amy (18:48):

So let’s turn our attention to ministry connection. You mentioned this earlier. What did you learn about the next steps people are taking beyond the weekend services?

Tony (18:58):

Well, yeah, as I mentioned earlier, this really does seem to be a challenge for most churches right now. If we’re celebrating the wins around attendance growth, we’re asking a lot of questions right now, I think, need to be around ministry engagement. And, as an example, now 47% of adults and students are connected in some form of a smaller group. And, Amy, we’ve been looking at this data for years. That’s the first time that that number has come in under 50%.

Amy (19:31):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (19:32):

So, a bit discouraging and challenging, and I know pastors are feeling that right now. Why is it that people are not connecting into small groups as often as they have in the past? And what can we be doing to turn that around? Likewise, only 34% of adults and students are serving at least once per month. And that’s slightly down from where we were this point last year, where it was at 37%. But it’s well below the 45 to 50% we typically saw before the pandemic. And what’s surprising, this seems to be continuing to go down, which I understood in the heart of the pandemic; it was harder for people to serve during that season. But, now, we’re comparing apples-to-apples data. We’re looking at where we were post-pandemic last summer comparing it to where we are this summer. And volunteer engagement has continued to go down. So, as I mentioned in this quarter’s report, it feels as if we’re starting from scratch in many ways when it comes to engagement in groups and in serving. That may not be a bad thing for us to step back and look at how do we help people step into serving opportunities. How do we help connect people into small groups? And just revisiting our strategies around that and making it as easy as possible for people to make that connection. Churches have largely been able to recover when it comes to attendance and in-person worship gatherings, but, on the other hand, many people still have not reconnected to a group or a serving team. So maybe if 2021 and 2022 were all about getting more people to come back to church, maybe 2023 needs to be more about reconnecting people to other people through groups or through serving teams. And, Amy, I’m just wondering, are you seeing similar challenges with engagement in groups and serving in the churches that you’re working with?

Amy (21:36):

Hmm. Good question. You know, I think I’m seeing the disconnect primarily in the serving area. As you know, Tony, I work with a lot of churches on their staffing and structure challenges, and most of the churches I’ve served the past few months have less than 50% of their attendance serving, like you’re talking about. And they had also had a low number of volunteers in leadership positions. So part of that was on them because some of the churches had never created some higher-level volunteer roles for people to fill. And part of that is just a lack of engagement with their congregations, as you said. But it’s not the story everywhere. That’s, that’s been the general trend, right? Overstaffed, under volunteered, under volunteer leadership roles. But it’s not the story everywhere. I just returned to a church that engaged The Unstuck Process in early 2022, and I was just back there to refresh their plans. And their volunteer engagement has increased from 49% back in January of 2022 to over 56% now. And they’ve also moved from the maintenance side of the church life cycle over to the strategic growth side in that 18-month timeframe, as well.

Tony (22:45):

Wow, that’s fantastic.

Amy (22:45):

They put in a lot of hard work. You know they worked their plans, and they got unstuck. So there are definitely bright spots on that serving side, too. And I would say they have a real focus on connecting people to people, and you can just sense it in their staff team, which I’m sure permeates their congregation. All right. Well, let’s wrap up today’s conversation by talking about ministry staffing and finances. And, again, there is way too much data in the full report to go through everything in today’s conversation, but, Tony, please share with us some of the items that stood out to you.

Tony (23:18):

Well, let’s start with the money side, talking about finances, and this is good news in a way. Giving is up year-over-year across the churches on average. In fact, there was over a 4% increase year-over-year in giving, but this is the first time in months that giving has outpaced inflation. And because of that, because inflation has been such a challenge for churches in driving up costs for ministry and cost for staffing, I think we’re still playing catch up. And, and I think a lot of churches are feeling that still. And, on top of that, attendance growth is far outpacing giving growth. And so there’s, we’re seeing very clear evidence of that lag in giving in churches in this season. Interestingly, churches, kind of the mid-size churches, churches that are between 200 and a thousand people in attendance, they’re giving up was up more than 5% year-over-year. But, on the other hand, smaller churches, churches under 200, their giving was only up 1% year-over-year. So, it seems that financial challenges, if they’re impacting churches, they’re impacting the smaller churches the most in this season. If you’re curious, as it relates to giving, the per capita giving amount right now that we’re seeing is about $60 per person per week. And that’s pulling out kids’ attendance. So we’re assuming kids aren’t giving yet, if anything, very little. So we’re pulling out kids’ attendance and just looking at per capita giving, we’re seeing $60 per person per week. So, that’s the average; of course, that varies across different regions in the country, but it will give you a sense of kind of where giving is maybe in your church in the season, as well. And the other thing that we can point to when it comes to finances, and I mentioned this earlier, is just the average church, they’re in a healthy position right now when it comes to cash in the bank. And they’re in a healthy position right now when it comes to having an, a manageable amount of debt if they have debt at all. So, I think a lot of good signs when it comes to finances. However, the giving, it it needs, we need to continue to see growth there to make up for what we’ve experienced the last couple years.

Amy (25:51):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (25:51):

On the staffing side, if churches are facing a cash crunch, it may be because of what we’re seeing related to the trends in staffing because the average church right now has one full-time equivalent staff person for every 53 people in attendance. And that’s compared to kind of the recommendation we use with churches is to have one full-time equivalent staff person for every 75 people in attendance.

Amy (26:22):

Mm-hmm.

Tony (26:22):

So a lot more staff than we, we would encourage churches to typically have. And we always get the question, when you talk about the staffing ratios, are you just talking about ministry staff? Who are you talking about? We, again, to keep it apples-to-apples, we just look at every paid staff person in the church, and we look at full-time. We look at part-time people to make sure that we’re getting apples-to-apples comparisons across all the churches. But, again, this is one of the biggest differences that we’re seeing currently between large and small churches. Churches with over a thousand people in attendance have a 1:70 ratio. In other words, there’s one full-time staff person for every 70 people in attendance. On the other hand, churches under 200, they have twice as many staff right now. So there’s one staff person for every 35 people in attendance.

Amy (27:19):

Wow.

Tony (27:20):

So, with that, again, if for smaller churches, my suspicion is financially, they’re starting to feel that right now because their giving isn’t going up as fast as other-sized churches, and they have more staff than other-sized churches compared to attendance. And the other factor here that we always look at is how much are churches spending on staffing? And we recommend that churches kind of use between 45 and 55% of their overall budget to invest in staff. And that includes wages and benefits and payroll taxes and everything associated with that investment. On average, churches are now at 56% of their budget spent on staffing. Some, of course, are below that. Some, of course, when they reported their data are well above that. But that, that to me is a concern, and especially when giving doesn’t always keep up with the growth that we’re experiencing in our churches, being overstaffed can present some challenges. But, Amy, anything in that information that surprises you?

Amy (28:36):

No, not at all. It reflects what I’m seeing in the churches that I’m, I’m serving. You know, when I work with churches, I’m looking at those metrics, and they each tell a story. For instance, most of the churches I work with are on that higher end of the 45 to 55% range we recommend. So, they’re in range. They’re just at the top of the range, and that’s fine. And that range, I think, is good, Tony, because it gives a church boundaries on the budget that they’re dedicating to staffing. But the other metric, which is often much lower than it should be, far from that 75:1 that indicates that they’re not spending that staffing budget well. Typically, they’re spending it primarily on ministry doers rather than ministry leaders. So my advice to them often is to reallocate those dollars and add a few leader roles onto their team. With churches still growing, because, by the way, same with the growth, these, these churches are growing in the double-numbers right now. My advice is to reallocate those dollars, add a few leaders. And with churches still growing at those high numbers that we saw pre-pandemic, I think they can often grow into better ratios if they hire some leaders. So my word to them is often progress, not perfection. They should, however, set goals just like they do in all the other areas to be moving towards a healthier attendee-to-staff ratio. So those are two things I think for our listeners to get a handle on. Are we staying within that budget boundary? And then how are we actually spending that money will be indicated by your FTE to average attendees. So, well, Tony, any other final thoughts before we wrap up today’s conversation? We’ve covered a lot of ground.

Tony (30:21):

We’ve done a lot of math today, which I enjoy, but I don’t know if all our listeners do. So, with that in mind, here’s the deal. I see myself as kind of my, my strength is looking at data and identifying, “Ah, there’s a trend that’s happening in churches.” I don’t think I’m very good at kind of predicting the future. And so what do these trends mean for the future of the church? And of that, we have a bonus episode coming up.

Amy (30:49):

Hmm.

Tony (30:49):

The next episode of the podcast is going to feature a conversation I had with my friend Carey Nieuwhof, and Carey and I talked about future trends because he’s a lot better at that then I am.

Amy (31:01)

He’s so good at that.

Tony (31:02)

Yeah, so you’ll be able to look forward to that conversation, it’ll be the next episode that we release. But with that, we didn’t have time in today’s conversation to talk about several other current trends that we’re seeing in churches, so if you want to see that data and learn more about what other churches are experiencing, go to theunstuckgroup.com/trends to access the current Unstuck Church Report and to subscribe to future quarterly releases.

Sean (31:35)

Well thanks for joining us on this week’s podcast. If you like what you’re hearing on the podcast and it’s been helpful to you in some way, we’d love your help in getting the word out. You can do that by subscribing on your favorite podcasting platform, giving us a review, and telling somebody else about the podcast. Next week, we’re going to be back with another brand new episode, so until then, we hope you have a great week.

Tony Morgan

Tony is the Founder and Lead Strategist of The Unstuck Group. Started in 2009, The Unstuck Group has served 500 churches throughout the United States and several countries around the world. Previously, Tony served on the senior leadership teams of three rapidly growing churches including NewSpring Church in South Carolina. He has five published books including, The Unstuck Church, and, with Amy Anderson, he hosts The Unstuck Church Podcast which has thousands of listeners each month.

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