The Need for Speed (Part One)
Have you ever missed out on something simply because you were too slow to act?
A sale?
A concert?
A relationship?
This week, I went to a website for a local theater to buy 5 seats next to each other for my family to see the movie “Twisters”.
We were pretty excited. After debating the best day for all of us, we began to discuss the best time.
After all that, the only 5 seats next to each other were in the front row with our necks cranked upward to see the screen from the far left.
We didn’t end up going.
Whether it’s going online the moment Taylor Swift tickets go on sale…
Or camping out at an electronics store before Black Friday kicks in…
we live in a world where being too slow to buy reserved seats for a movie can determine whether you can go or not.
It shouldn’t surprise us that there is a need to act quickly when it comes to important aspects of life and ministry as well.
In other words, there is a need for speed.
When it comes to helping guests “Climb the Assimilayas,” I began seeing a shift after the pandemic.
The amount of time people were willing to invest in order to engage with something new had dropped.
This was true of both church members and guests. Here are the dots I began to connect:
Volunteers were not as willing to serve every weekend as they were before COVID.
At my church, we went from 40% of the auditorium attendance being volunteers to just 15%. (to see how we addressed that issue, open this and read it later: Volunteers are Evaporating: Here are Four Fixes.)
The number of guests who were willing to complete our 4-week assimilation program called “Next Steps” went down by 20%.
The amount of guests that found a small group through Next Steps went down by 31% and the amount of those who became volunteers reduced by 38%!
People both new and old to our church were no longer attending worship physically on a consistent basis.
They were enjoying the new found freedom of straddling the online experience of church and going physically less often than they did before COVID.
It took me a bit, but after a while it hit me: if our invested church members where less willing to attend every week and serve, how on earth could I expect guests at the church to connect by finishing a 4-week assimilation program?
I was beginning to sense their need for speed.
12 years ago, the studies I read indicated that if a guest at your church didn’t connect with 4 to 6 people by name and know some basic things about them (with those people getting to know them as well), then their attendance would begin to wane within 4 to 6 months and they would no longer be attending by the 12 month marker.
Though I have no definitive studies to back this up yet (please leave any in the comments if you do)…
I suspect that this time span has shortened dramatically post-COVID.
Let’s connect a few more dots to underscore the need for speed:
Our mission as a church is to make disciples.
No one has ever made a disciple out of an unconnected person. Literally, connection precedes discipleship.
Lack of connection then is the biggest obstacle to mission fulfillment in your church.
Increasing the speed of connection will allow you to make disciples and make more of them.
Many of you have been contacting me to see if the rumor is true:
Has my church redesigned its 4-weeks Next Step program to increase the speed of connection?
The answer is YES.
It is now a one-week experience with one ask for the guests who attend.
If you want to know more about it, here’s how:
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this post (coming soon) where I will share what we now ask of guests at our new One Program and the rationale behind it.
Attend my 1-day “Increasing the Speed of Connection at your Church” Pre-Con in Arizona. Click here to find out more. Mine is the one for the category “Connection and Hospitality.”
The bottom line is simple: we need to accelerate connection for new people in this hour.
The speed by which guests reach the summit of connection with others and with God at your church must increase.
To learn how I am applying this in the One Program for guests at my church, stayed tuned for Part 2.
See you on the climb,
