Your church doesn’t need more guests
"How do we get more guests?"
It might be the single most common question we hear. Every week, from pastors and connections directors who love their churches and are working themselves to the bone. Same thing, over and over.
And everywhere they turn, the answer is the same. The marketers, the ad guys, the whole church-growth machine hum one note: you need more guests. More guests! More guests fixes everything. Buy the ads. Boost the posts. Print the invite cards. Pack the parking lot. Your problem is a numbers problem, and the fix lives at the top of the funnel.
It's trash.
Not "well, it's a little more complicated than that" trash. Just trash — the most expensive wrong answer being sold to churches right now. And here's the part the more-guests crowd will never put in an ad, because they can't sell against it:
Your church already has the guests.
Over the course of a year, most churches see about as many first-time guests as their entire weekend attendance. A church of 1,000 will have roughly 1,000 guests walk through the doors in the next twelve months.
They're already coming. Already curious. Already in the room.
Problem is… the average church identifies fewer than half of them.
Half. 10-20% in the roughest cases. Gone. Names you never got, relationships that never started, because they slipped out before anyone noticed they were there.
That's the definition of a leak. And you cannot out-spend a leak; more ad money just pours more water through a bucket full of holes.
So forget "more guests." You have more guests than you think you do. The only question that matters is whether you're catching the ones already raising their hand.
And your welcome desk is the wrong finish line
Once churches stop chasing traffic, they tend to run straight into the second myth: that the win is getting guests to what we’ve always called their One Place — the welcome desk, the connection center, whatever you call it.
Getting people there matters. A lot. We've spent over a decade helping churches build a One Place guests can't miss, and it's one of the most important things you can get right.
But it was never the finish line. The One Place is a means. The end is identification: the moment a stranger stops being anonymous and hands you enough to start a relationship.
And that splits the work into two jobs.
Job #1:
make it so easy and enticing to identify that more people actually do it. A sharper invitation. A desk they can't miss. A gift worth crossing the room for.
Job #2:
catch the guests already raising their hand somewhere else entirely — because you have way more of those than you think. They're just doing it in places you're not looking.
Both roads lead to the same place: names you can follow up with.
10 questions you can run before this Sunday
This idea started in one of weekly huddles inside the Sherpa Tribe. Someone asked that famous six-word question about identifying more guests, and Greg just started firing off questions. They were small ones… almost annoyingly small. And you could watch it land on people's faces:
We're losing them in the gaps we thought were too tiny to matter.
We chatted about hit rapid fire questions after the huddle and wrote down a few more… and ended up writing down sixty. I’ll swing back around to those in a minute.
For right now, here are ten you can run and do something about before this Sunday.
Grab a coffee, read them slowly, and every one you answer with a wince is a lever you can pull this week.
➊ Do your guests only count if they come to the desk?
Think about everyone who identified themselves somewhere else this Sunday. First-time givers. A prayer card. A baptism signup. A parent checking in a kid for the first time. Every one of them is a first-time guest, or at least new to your database — they just tipped their hand from a different spot in the building. Do they get the same welcome, the same gift, the same follow-up? Or do they vanish because they didn't walk up to the right table?
➋ Is the guest invitation your first announcement — or your fourth?
If a guest has to sit through the potluck reminder, the parking update, and the small-group push before anyone acknowledges they exist, you've told them exactly where they rank.
➌ Is your One Place where guests actually are — or where you wish they'd go?
Most welcome desks are parked where it was convenient to put a table. Not where the foot traffic runs. Walk your lobby as a nervous first-timer and see if you'd ever even find it.
➍ Is your welcome gift worth crossing a crowded room for?
Be honest. Would you stick around another 5 minutes with cranky, hungry kids for what's on that table? If it's a pen and a bulletin, the answer is no — and so is theirs.
➎ Do you hand the gift out right at kids check-in?
A first-time family already has to stop at check-in. If they have to go find a second station afterward to be "official," most won't. What if the moment they dropped off their kid was the moment they got the full welcome?
➏ Is there a path for the guest who wants to be known — and then wants to leave?
Not everyone will walk up and talk to a stranger. The introvert who'd never approach your desk will happily scan a QR code from their seat and slip out quietly. If your only front door requires a handshake, you're filtering out too much of the room.
➐ Are you asking for too much?
Name, email, phone. Stop there. Every extra field on that card is another reason for a nervous guest to put the pen down or X out of the tab.
➑ Can your volunteers recognize guests and go to them?
A first-timer arrives early and unsure. Reads the signage. Looks a little lost during communion. Is dressed differently than the room. Your team walks past those people every week. Have you ever actually taught them what a guest looks like — and what to do when they spot one?
➒ When a pastor meets a brand-new family, does that info survive to Monday?
Your lead pastor shakes hands with a first-time family in the hallway. Great moment. Now — does their name and number make it into a system? Or does it die in his memory somewhere around Tuesday?
➓ Are you counting guests from every hook — or just the desk?
If the only guests you count are the ones who signed a card at the One Place, your number is fiction. And you can't fix a leak you're not measuring.
So… How'd you do?
If you're being honest, you probably just found three or four leaks you didn't know you had. Maybe more.
That's the good news. Every one of those is fixable.
But knowing where you leak isn't the same as knowing how to seal it.
Question 8 is a perfect example. "Can your volunteers recognize a guest?" is easy to ask. Actually training a team of volunteers to spot a first-timer, walk up without being weird, ask the right questions, and hand them off — that's the work. That's a conversation. Several conversations, actually — with your staff, your key volunteers, and the guests themselves.
That's the difference between a diagnostic and a plan.
Already purchased this Action Plan, or are in the Sherpa Tribe?
The new 60 Ways Field Guide is yours already along with the rest of the plan!
Just login at tribe.assimilayas.com to check it out.
