Where my small church stands

 

I am really excited to get this tribe of small church leaders established; I can’t wait to see how many hands make the work light applied to action.  Before I get too far ahead let me explain where I’m starting in my small church. My family’s church Returning to Truth Ministries was established 2/9/2003. When our church started it was not as diverse as one would like for a startup, (In time you will see I make many comparisons to a church and a startup firm) the demographics were either over 35 or less than 20, black, low income, and unemployed. So we started off rough, we also started off with less than 20 members. We fall into a group not even listed in most church size classifications.  Needless to say we’ve had the hamster wheel affect when it comes to growth.

As the under 20 crowd grew and had children the numbers increased and for a while we hit the magical 50 number but people lost interest ,lost passion, or gained independence and stop coming(myself included for a few years) but as of 2017 we have made a commitment to grow the ministry. So far things have been gradual but still not where we would like. Let me back up and explain why we made the jump to grow the church and hurdles we had along the way.

·         We have had 7 location moves from 2006-2015

·         3 of the 7 required major overhauls to the building.

·         We didn’t have a plan in place for growth

·         We weren’t deliberate in our growth attempts

Now you may think the last 2 items are the same but they differ greatly, having a plan and being deliberate in your actions are very different.  Our plans are the road maps to our desired outcome but we can course correct, redefine, and adjust as data, results, and resources come to play. Being deliberate in our attempts requires some action. We have to do x in order to get said outcome. This is many small churches short coming and as a tribe we will help others get past this hurdle.

In 2017 we acquired resources to track data to help us create a baseline and see what works and what needs some improvements. Many times we keep doing the same things without the whole picture. If we believe it’s based on luck or skill level we fall into biases, Annie Duke’s book Thinking in Bets states” When we work backwards from results to figure out why those things happened, we are susceptible to a variety of cognitive traps, like assuming causation when there is only correlation, or cherry-picking data to confirm there narrative we prefer.” If we get great growth it’s because we’re so awesome and people love our praise team or if we lose people it’s because our neighborhood is in a bad location.

This takes the blame off us or makes us seem really amazing when other factors play a big part in the outcome. Without data the growth rate would be attributed to the praise team and not the teens posting about the church. Most don’t see the new arrivals are teens and share the same social network as your church teens they just see bodies. On the other hand most see the bad neighborhood and not the fact that the local anchor that brings people to that community (employers, government resource, large chain store i.e. Walmart, Kmart, etc.). have moved from the neighborhood.

Currently we have 25 members of our church with a much more diverse demographical spread.  We have an established location with a closer to finished look and we have facts and figures to help us in the journey. Well, good people I wanted you to see where we are starting from in this endeavor and can’t wait to share and learn from the group. Be a blessing to others & stay prayed up.

 

Later Dayz,

 

J