What would happen if the unchurched in your community suddenly attended your church this Sunday?
Would you be ready?
Hopefully that sounds like a dream come true. Let’s pretend your attendance doubled – or tripled. And it’s the good kind of attendance increase, not the kind where you add disgruntled churchgoers who will soon find reasons to be disgruntled with your church!
At Watermarke Church, that is basically our story. When I first arrived to lead our church, we were stagnant at best. Watermarke was losing families weekly. This presented an obvious problem and distinct opportunity. We had to change and reframe our culture and collectively recommit to our vision – creating a church unchurched people would love to attend.
In our case, the hard work paid off. God led us to make many changes and our church began to grow quickly. As exciting as the new growth was, though, creating a church that attracted unchurched people has a disadvantage I never considered: unchurched people don’t know how to be church people. More specifically, they do not serve or give or participate, they only consume. Of course we were grateful to have their consumption, but I quickly realized encouraging and equipping our unchurched friends to participate IN the mission rather than consume FROM the mission was critical to our mission. More importantly, it was critical to their growing relationship with Jesus.
If you are attracting unchurched people at your church – GREAT JOB! You are doing something many churches desire but few achieve. From my experience, there are strategic ways to encourage these new attendees to engage, too. Here’s SIX specific things you can do now to speed up the unchurch onramp to participation:
1. Make it comfortable, not weird.
The reason most churches cannot attract the unchurch in their community is because most churches are created by church people for church people. Think about most churches we’ve attended. It was only comfortable if you understood the structure of the Bible; who wrote it, when, and why; when to sit, when to stand, and when to sit again; the reason we always skip the third stanza in a hymn… you get the point. If only church people can understand your church experience, the unchurched will experience confusion and frustration. That’s not a recipe for a revisit.
Quick side note: Remember to explain at the beginning of the service why you are gathered and what you are going to do during the service. Make sure the guests in the room are acknowledged discretely (please don’t make them stand) and tell them EXACTLY what to expect.
2. Ensure all rungs on the spiritual growth ladder are present.
If we hope to engage the unchurched in a spiritual journey, we must create options and opportunities for the unchurched to participate in entry-level groups and service.
At Watermarke, we offer Starting Point, a 10-week, conversational small group environment for people who are new or exploring faith. Literally hundreds of people have experienced a Starting Point Group. I love that our Guest Service volunteer teams are full of people exploring faith. We realized you don’t need a relationship with God to help people find a seat or a parking place. What better way to explore faith than volunteering beside others at a church!
3. Create obvious and logical steps.
If spiritual growth is a journey, then we must remember all journeys begin with steps and only continue when people keep walking. If at any point the steps cease, the journey ends. Obviously, at times people will elect to stop moving forward, or they might even take a step backward, but as a church, we must ensure that is their choice rather than our imposition.
At Watermarke, we have several “doorway” environments that provide opportunities for attendees to take next steps. Our most prominent step is NEXT, a monthly, 12-minute gathering immediately following our church services were I meet with people who are ready to investigate a next step.
Note the word “investigate.” We do not expect people to take blind steps. Rather, we encourage attendees to investigate a step before taking the step. What’s great is the investigation is itself a step (albeit small), and it makes the next step much less of a leap.
4. Provide practical teaching.
Practical teaching is what will keep an unchurched person in your church, and it might be the key to transitioning them into “churched” people. Practical teaching is taking biblical truths and distilling them down to simple, applicable principles. If you do this in your church already, you know it’s a harder way to prepare, but a better way to preach.
Practical teaching makes the truth both digestible and comprehensible – both requirements for people unfamiliar with the Scripture to engage and connect. This method of communication allows us to practically explain the why’s and how’s of participating in the church and with God. Many unchurched people simply do not know how to participate or have been burned through past participation. Practical teaching helps us bridge both of these issues.
5. Celebrate next steps.
We all know “what’s rewarded is repeated.” When it comes to unchurched people taking spiritual steps, this principle is certainly true and can be leveraged in powerful ways. At Watermarke, we try to celebrate any steps people take in our church. We reward new givers. We reward those who attend an information meeting about serving. Whatever the step, we want to reward their effort and encourage them to continue.
Our rewards are varied, yet simple. We give first-time guests a small gift, including a music CD, book, and a Watermarke tumbler cup. For other steps, we give away other appropriate gifts. Public celebration (when done well) is a nice reward. The point: We want to associate rewards with steps, because that makes the next step easier.
6. Highlight and celebrate stories of life change.
There are so many advantages to publicly sharing stories of life change in the corporate setting. Stories provide compelling evidence that hope is possible for everyone – even the unchurched. When an unchurched person experiences a story, it provides hope that life can be better. As I’ve said before, we can argue about what Jesus did in the Bible, but it’s hard to argue about what he’s done in others.
At Watermarke, we celebrate life change in many ways. The best example is through our baptism process. To be baptized in our service, we require people to record a 2 – 3 minute video testimony. Everybody complains about recording videos, but it’s worth it – both for them and everyone in the audience. But that is only one channel for sharing stories. We often highlight volunteers, read emails, send emails, and more. The point is simple: Sharing stories provides hope for a better story.
I hope you have hundreds, or even thousands, of unchurched people attending your church. If you want to attract them and move them, make sure you have systems in place to help them move forward. That is what we hope for everyone in the world, and as a church, we have the potential for that to happen every week.
I know there are many other ways to move our unchurched attendees toward church engagement. What am I missing? How have you successfully engaged the unchruched in your church?
Please comment to let me know, and share this post so we can get more voices in the conversation.
