I have said, “What would you do if you were me?” plenty of times. Mostly with a smile. But we want to say, “I don’t like how you…”
A Long-Term Solution To Avoid Unnecessary Attrition
We’ll never stop all the attrition. As we said, that shouldn’t be our aim.
Yet too many people leave churches only to find themselves dissatisfied at their next church. And their next church.
There is a commonality with each of the above attrition excuses/reasons. Did you see it when you read through them?
- Self-focus.
The worst reason to leave a church is that it does not meet your consumeristic needs. But by the time people offer these reasons and walk out the door, it’s too late to address the problem behind the problem.
People are by nature self-focused and live as consumers. We cannot change there intrinsic DNA. We can, however, build a church from the ground up focused on something greater than ourselves: Jesus and others.
The best way to avoid unnecessary attrition is to design and implement a discipleship pathway that focuses people on the Kingdom over their kingdom and others over themselves.
2. This is the essence of spiritual formation.
The more people grow in Christ, the less they focus on themselves.
Churches that can’t create a hunger for spiritual growth AND don’t offer a discipleship pathway for growth unnecessarily lose people.
Not to oversimplify it, but people rarely leave a church that’s inspiring and supporting their spiritual growth. The one solution to all selfish attrition is discipleship.
What Is Your Discipleship Plan?
This question becomes the most critical question to answer. Discipleship involves reaching the lost and growing the found. A great church intentionally does both well.
If you feel your church isn’t effective at both, ask these questions at your next leadership team or Elder’s meeting:
- How would we describe our approach to discipleship?
- Is our path to reaching our community and growing believers intentional?
- Do we focus more on reaching the non-believer or growing the believer?
- Considering our discipleship approach: What is working? What’s not working? What’s confusing? What’s missing?
- How are we intentionally creating a hunger for spiritual growth?
- How do we inspire people to take steps in their faith journey?
Wrapping Up…
It’s not our job to keep people in our church. Our job is to create a holistic discipleship experience that makes them never want to leave.
When you can, engage people in a leaving conversation and attempt to get past their initial reason. I suspect you’ll find, in most cases, a bit of self-focused delusion and a lack of discipleship. In a way, both problems are our problems to solve attrition.
THis article on church attrition originally appeared here, and is used by permission.
