WHY ARE CHURCHES FAILING TO FOLLOW UP ON WORSHIP GUESTS?

In church after church where I work, I discover there is no system (or too little system) for getting to know worshipers and following up with them after they visit a worship service or other church gathering.  We have known for many decades that visitor follow-up is a foundational best practice for growing and renewing a church - and yet, most pastors are just not getting around to it.  It is baffling.  Follow up is more than a pastoral responsibility - but if just the pastors would take seriously the people who wanted in the doors on Sunday - it might be revolutionary.

In case you don’t know, I have been working ten hours a week for my home church for the last 18 months.  One of the things I love to do is to sit down with new attendees and/or persons joining the church, and get to know them.  Recently I was sitting on the patio of a new church participant, a brilliant man in so many ways.  And he said to me, “You are the first pastor to ever visit me.”  How strange!

Whether they be introverts or extroverts, people who wander into churches these days (with all the reasons not to!) are usually seeking something important.  Can we not honor that enough to sit down and hear a bit of their stories?  That conversation may offer more than a year’s worth of sermons in terms of life impact for them personally.  A church needs a plan for how it will respond to folks on at least the first three times that they register their presence - differently each time.  This could be a pastoral contact, a coffee meeting, a connection to a peer in their life demographic, etc.  It could be an invitation to the next church potluck to be guests of a member or a member family.  There is no right or wrong way to respond to people - just respond!!  If I hear another person say, “I visited three churches and asked for a visit on the attendance card, but no one ever contacted me,” I think I might scream.

Some churches have very few guests in worship, but others experience a steady stream of guests.  In the latter case, only a handful of these fresh faces will stick around long-term.  However, it is almost guaranteed that a church can double the percentage of guests it retains simply by creating a systematic plan for response and following the plan.  Thus the church that retains 20 percent of its guests could retain 40 percent, and so on.  In many cases, that alone would send the attendance trajectory up again.  So easy!  And yet so few churches have any plan of response when God sends people to us.

Does your church have a plan for follow up with worship guests?  Who would know?  Could you check this week?  And if there is no plan, could you help your pastor out by spearheading a group to design a response strategy so that no one falls through the cracks?