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4 Ways to Break the Attendance Barrier

3. Create new venues.

This principle is similar to adding worship services, but the church uses a different facility for the new service.

That new facility may actually be a new campus. It may be an ethnic service meeting in the church facilities in a different room than the worship center. It may be a merged church from another location. The possibilities are many.

Evaluation: The results thus far are positive. As a church adds a new venue, there is a natural increase in attendance. The multicampus form of this new venue is growing in use and popularity with mostly good results.

We are still a few years away from being able to measure the midterm impact of new venues on growth. I would be willing to speculate that the results will be very positive.

4. Have a major event.

The church’s strategy is to have one or more events that will create sufficient excitement for members to invite those who aren’t attending church. That event may be tied to a major holiday such as Easter, Fourth of July or Christmas. It may be tied to a significant tradition in a church.

The plan is to get people to attend who would not regularly attend.

Evaluation: I have studied a few hundred churches that use the big event as their major growth strategy, and the results are not good. Attendance tends to rise for a few weeks on and after the event, but then it settles down to previous patterns.

Churches can spend a lot of money on big events, but I hardly ever see a church break an attendance barrier consistently, even with those large amounts of resources dedicated to it.

What successful approaches have you seen to break attendance barriers?

What do you think of these approaches I have highlighted?

Why do churches not create new groups regularly and strategically when it has proven to be the most effective method for growth and for breaking attendance barriers?