⛪️ Practical Church: Why (and how) you should track small group attendance
💡 1 SOLUTION FOR EFFECTIVE MINISTRY
Tracking small group (or whatever you call your groups) attendance is a great way to track people’s engagement at your church. Increasingly post-covid, weekly Sunday attendance is more inconsistent, and while the Sunday gathering is a vital part of our faith, it can be hard to rely on that as a metric for how connected people really are at your church.
At New City, one of the metrics we also track is community group attendance. This allows us to see how many people are not only in a group (most churches know that) but how often people actually attend. A change in a group attendance pattern is often a sign that something might be going on in someone’s. It also shows the group leader(s) exactly how often someone does attend or not.
At New City, we create Google Sheets for each group, and the person who runs groups at our church stays on top of group leaders to ensure they are filling out their attendance. This is important, as people won’t do it if no one follows up with it. Below is an example of what our attendance sheets look like. For each new community group session, you can simply add a new tab for that season. Below is an example:
This allows us to see who is really attending, and what the average number of attendees typically is. This is also helpful in placing new people in a group. Just because a group has 12 people currently in it, that doesn’t really tell you if they have room or not; it depends on the average attendance frequency of the participants.
Note: to make this easier for your group leaders, you should make the Google Sheet (or whatever you want to use) for them, and just have them fill in with an “x” each week for who attends.
We have found this to be one of the ways to better track the engagement of our people at New City Church.
💬 2 HELPFUL QUOTES
I. Francis de Sales on preaching:
“The test of a preacher is that people don’t say ‘What a lovely sermon!’ but, ‘I will do something!”
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II. Thomas Mitchell on how to be productive:
“It is wonderful how much work can be got through in a day, if we go by the rule—map out our time, divide it off, and take up one thing regularly after another. To drift through our work, or to rush through it in a helter-skelter fashion, ends in comparatively little being done. ‘One thing at a time’ will always perform a better day's work than doing two or three things at a time. By following this rule, one person will do more in a day than another does in a week.”
🎙 THIS WEEK ON THE PODCAST
I talk about 7 ways to increase financial generosity at your church, why unscheduled tasks take more time to do, if you should try something different, Bible translations, and more.
💯 1 PRACTICAL RESOURCE FOR MINISTRY
Christ-Centered Preaching by Bryan Chapell
Two things I really took away from this book; the finding the fallen condition focus of a text and creating a sermon outline that actually flows together. If you want some practical help in preaching a more structured sermon, check out this book.
💪 1 CHALLENGE FOR LIFE AND MINISTRY
What if I set a firm deadline and no longer pushed it back?
P.S. Who is the greatest babysitter mentioned in the Bible?
David. He rocked Goliath to sleep.
