When January rolls around, people of every age look for fresh starts, new habits, and positive changes they can make to help them have a better year than the one before.
In the same spirit, your ministry is looking at methods and strategies to help with church growth over the next calendar year. You want to make improvements to help build the Kingdom and avoid things that will hinder your mission. And one goal that comes up time and again is increasing member engagement.
With numbers on the decline over the last few years, increasing church attendance should receive a large percentage of your attention. However, while getting people through your doors is important, helping them shift from attendees to engaged disciples is critical to truly seeing Kingdom growth.
Lifeway Research’s 2022 Greatest Needs of Pastors shows that 75% of pastors say that apathy or lack of commitment are significant concerns. So, how do you move people from only coming to services 1-3 times a month to engaged and active members in the life of your church?
Here are 4 things you should do to maximize your efforts to increase engagement in the coming months.
Step 1: Define Member Engagement
Defining what engagement looks like for your congregation is the first step to helping your members grow in the new year.
You may decide that for your ministry, an engaged member is someone involved in a small group or Bible study outside of corporate worship services. Or you could define an engaged member as someone serving in at least one volunteer position, either occasionally or in a recurring role. It may be that someone participates in mission trips and community service projects, gives regularly, or connects with your church in some other way.
Perhaps member engagement looks like all of the above for your congregation, with different milestones set based on where people are in their walk with Jesus or how long they’ve been attending your church.
There is no wrong answer when it comes to defining member engagement, but take the time to think critically about what that looks like for your ministry and for the growth of your church and its disciples. What works for your church may be completely different from the church across town. Look carefully at the mission and vision of your church and the other ministry goals you’ve already set for this year to help you decide where your engagement priorities should fall.
However you choose to define engagement, the ultimate objective is to get people involved in the life of your church rather than just showing up a few times a month as passive attendees.
Step 2: Set Realistic Goals for Engagement
Once you’ve defined what an engaged member looks like in your ministry, work with your staff and leadership to set realistic goals for the upcoming year.
If your definition is that members give regularly, you may focus more on encouraging tithes and offerings than a church that wants each member to serve as a volunteer. A church that wants to see regular attendees join Sunday School classes or weeknight life groups will spend more time promoting those than a church working to get people to sign up to serve at the local soup kitchen.
Your goals should center around your definition of an engaged member, but you can’t set realistic goals unless you know where you stand right now. Part of the process of looking ahead is figuring out just how engaged people are in the present.
Once you have an idea of the current levels of engagement across your congregation, you can decide how you’d like to see your church grow in the coming year and set goals for how to get there.
Step 3: Develop a Plan For Engagement
Keeping your goals in mind, come up with a plan to help reach those objectives. Creating smaller targets to hit throughout the year will keep you on track while planning incremental checkpoints will give you opportunities to reevaluate your plans and adjust accordingly. The end goal is to raise up mature disciples, so ensure whatever plans you develop put that mission at the forefront.
Having a plan for accomplishing your engagement goals is essential to successful church growth. Without a plan, you may see some increase in member engagement, but you’ll more likely remain stagnant or take steps backward because you haven’t dedicated time or resources to making that happen.
One of the best places to start is looking at where you’ve had success or difficulty in the past. See what you can do again, what you can tweak to fit your current initiatives, and what doesn’t work for your congregation.
For example, if you want to see more of your members serving as volunteers and you’ve seen a boom in recruitment following a volunteer fair, put another one on the church calendar. Spend time encouraging those who aren’t currently serving to attend and find their place to plug in. If you want to see more people sign up to go on mission trips or serve in local outreach efforts, try taking a survey of what places and needs mean the most to your congregants. You’ll likely see higher signups if you offer opportunities that people are passionate about.
Evaluating the rate of success in what you’ve done before will give you something to build on and help you avoid repeating ideas that have proved ineffective in the past.
Developing a plan to improve engagement rates among your members is the best and most likely way to guarantee you’ll see growth in the coming year.
Step 4: Track Engagement Progress
Plans and goals are only as effective as the efforts behind them. If you don’t know how you’re doing in terms of reaching your engagement goals or if you fail to keep up with the results of efforts that have already been made, you’re missing potential growth.
Leveraging an automated engagement tool like Growth Method to track members’ progress will give you the information you need when you reach the smaller milestones and deadlines that you’ve built into your engagement plan. You’ll be able to see quickly and easily where your efforts have been effective and where you need to adjust to stay on track.
You’ll have a hard time sticking to your plan and hitting each of your goals if you aren’t following the success of your efforts the whole way. Take the time to track progress so that when December 31st rolls around, you can truly see how engagement grew throughout the year.
And while the numbers are important and reaching goals is a worthy endeavor, remember that you’re training disciples to be fully engaged members of your church. The point isn’t to see how many volunteers you can recruit or to have so many Sunday School classes that you need a new building. Those things are great only if they are the result of lives changed through the power of the Gospel. Keep the ultimate goal at the head of everything you do “and all these things will be added to you.”
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