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7 Things That Will Drive Future Church Growth

We’re in a six-part series at Connexus Church called The Problem of God. It’s an apologetics series, and we really wanted people to invite their friends, which they did. We’ve set attendance records throughout the series.

We started by giving away free copies of the Problem of God book to kick off the series. That had the combined effect of drawing a lot of people in AND helping people go deep into the subject we’re tackling.

We’re also mashing up the digital world with live teaching by turning the six-part series into an 11-part series via our audio podcast…adding an interview I did with Problem of God author Mark Clark. Then in the final week of the series, we’re also adding four bonus messages covering subjects we didn’t tackle live on the weekend. They’re actually just repurposed messages from other series, but they will make a nice little package for anyone who wants to go deeper on the subject. It’s a way of driving engagement, invitation and deeper personal discipleship all at once. Plus, churches are famous for never using past content for future purposes, and this changes that. (You can see the approach here. NOTE: The final four bonus episodes will not appear until Sunday, February 18, 2018.)

Because we anticipated a high turnout and a lot of new people, we also ran special Starting Point groups and a Group Link to connect people in the middle of the series and saw a huge response.

The result? More people in person. More people engaging online. Much more sharing. People connecting relationally, baptism requests and already a few dozen decisions for Christ.

Otherwise, it could have just been a six-part series to kick off the new year.

See the difference a little experimentation can make?

So experiment.

Push Past Your Current Barriers

If you’re reaching more people but you’re currently stuck at an attendance plateau, I have some deeper practical help for you.

Breaking 200 Without Breaking You is a course I’ve created that provides strategies on how to tackle eight practical barriers (including a more nuanced and practical dive into everything I covered in this blog post) that keep churches from reaching more than 200 people. And it’s designed so I can walk your entire leadership team or elder board through the issues.

So whether your church is 50, 150 or 250 in attendance, the principles will help you gain the insight you need to break the barrier more than 85 percent of churches can’t break. Even churches with attendances of 300-500 are finding the material helpful as they try to reach more people.

Click here to get instant access for you and your team.

What Do You See?

As you look ahead to the future, what are the factors you see in growing churches?

This article originally appeared here.