[In “Forward to the Basics,” we are taking a fresh look at best practices in the critical areas of church life. This week: Membership Development.]

Any church can grow. Any church can have a lively community. Any church can transform lives. But the congregation must work at it and stop doing what doesn’t work.

What doesn’t work? Opening the doors on Sunday morning and expecting people to walk in. Many churches go months on end without a single Sunday visitor. Even churches that do have visitors can’t count on enough visitors to yield net growth after attrition (likely to be 20% a year). Moreover, regulars are tuning out of Sunday worship, attending less often and giving less support, both financial and volunteer time.

Nor does Sunday morning create the dynamic community that helps you to retain members. And earnestly pushing through a well-managed 70 minutes of singing, praying, preaching, greeting, and celebrating communion doesn’t transform lives. Transformation just isn’t that easy.

Sunday morning worship, in other words, isn’t a growth strategy. It isn’t even a survival strategy. It’s a beloved tradition, it serves a certain constituency, it’s worth doing, but it doesn’t lead by itself to a sustainable future. As long as Sunday morning is the main thing you do, your future is dim and short. Forget about tweaking Sunday worship to be more this or less that. Leave Sunday alone. Put your fresh energies and resources elsewhere.

Your membership development efforts must fall into three categories — and you must do all three, not just the one or two you find most comfortable.

RECRUITMENT

You must reach outside your walls and touch new contexts. You must look beyond people like yourselves and connect with new and unfamiliar constituencies. You need to know who they are, what issues they face in their lives, and what they seek from God. Get outside yourselves. Listen to the world and respond.

The heart of recruitment is communications — listening and speaking to people where they are — and having a compelling narrative to share. Prospects don’t care about your facilities or your traditions. They want to know if you stand for something worthwhile, specifically a mission worth getting excited about. Renting your space to Alcoholics Anonymous doesn’t count.

Your pastor must be an outstanding communicator, able to write blogs, emails and essays that convey depth and sincerity, able to build bridges to people in public settings by being a good listener. Your pastor must be an entrepreneur, gifted at seeing and seizing opportunities, and willing to take risks.

One key to recruitment is small groups, meeting at times other than Sunday morning and providing the intimacy and user-friendliness that Sunday rarely offers. You need a strategy for tracking leads, converting them to prospects, engaging them in group life, and then leading them to affiliation. Yes, it sounds like marketing. And it’s just as difficult to do.

You can’t keep focusing everything on getting “fannies in the pews” on Sunday. The payoff for member recruitment isn’t Sunday attendance; it’s a decision to affiliate, perhaps through a small group or mission team.

RETENTION

You must work just as hard at retaining members as you do at recruiting them. Sunday morning rarely qualifies as a retention tool. People want to be involved, make a difference, engage with needs and people, and be known in a way that sitting in a Sunday pew cannot provide.

Effective member-retention tools include small groups, midweek suppers, study groups, mission teams, retreats, and a significant relationship with the pastor. The retention scenario runs like this: they know me, I know them, they love me, they need me, I am making a difference, this is where I can serve God.

Being a name on a roster isn’t enough. Receiving a newsletter is nice. But receiving a message from the pastor or a lay leader asking your opinion, asking you to serve, showing that you matter — that is what makes a difference.

Retention, like recruitment, is hard work. You need a reliable system — a customer relationship management app, for example — for tracking your efforts at both recruitment and retention. You must combine customer service, training, team formation, conflict resolution, accountability, and continuous development of new engagement opportunities. A church isn’t something you wind once and it just keeps going.

TRANSFORMATION

In the end, a healthy faith community draws people closer to God and leads them to new life. Transformation means the constant challenge to reflect, pray, repent, serve, and thus to change. Always change, always the “new thing” God is doing.

Transformation takes work, both by the church to facilitate it and by the individual to risk it. Transformation tools include small groups, spiritual direction, study, doing mission work, worship, recovery from addiction, giving time to others, spiritual retreats. In such efforts, the individual reexamines his or her life, raises questions to God, works with spiritual friends, comes to fresh understandings, and, in the end, submits his or her life to God.

A healthy church sees transformation of individuals as mattering more than institutional survival.

About the Author

Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media