Continuing my highly derivative series on church trends, the next six are from Carey Nieuwhof’s post 6 Disruptive Church Trends That Will Rule 2017.
Trend 17: Engagement Will Become The New Attendance
As I outlined here, wise leaders have stopped trying to attract people and started trying to engage people.
Engagement will become the new growth engine in the future church.
One of the changes you’ll see happening in 2017 is leaders who measure engagement as much or more than attendance.
How many people serve, how many give, how many invite their unchurched friends and how many jump into community beyond Sunday will become the new measure of effectiveness in growing churches even more than attendance.
If you don’t know those numbers, you won’t be able to evaluate the effectiveness of your ministry.
Makes sense to me — although it’s a lot harder to count engaged members vs. attending members. But we surely all agree that attendance is not really the goal. We want those attending to be “active,” meaning that they participate in church ministries, they volunteer, they teach, they invite friends, they visit the sick … they do what the church is supposed to do rather than expecting the leaders to do it for them.
