4 keys to keeping people in church

I had an extended conversation with a pastor of a church this past week. The topic was not that different from those I've had with church leaders for nearly 25 years. The pastor's words were similar to those I've heard repeated hundreds of times: "We have a pretty good front door with a healthy number of guests. And we've had a steady increase in our number of new members. Our problem is really not the front door; it's the back door. If we could just keep a fourth of all those who become involved in our church for a few months or more, we would be triple our size."

He then asked the questions I was anticipating: "So how do we close the back door? What do we do to keep people from leaving our church or just becoming inactive?"

In our research of thousands of churches, we have found four common characteristics of congregations that have effective assimilation by almost any metric. But these churches that have effectively closed the back door are few in number, suggesting that the solution is easier said than done. Look at the four keys to effective assimilation. They are obviously not mutually exclusive. To read more, click here.