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When a church starts declining in membership, what are the questions it can ask to diagnose that decline?

Charles Arn responds in our Ask the Experts discussion.

Topics:	Assimilation, Church attendance, Newcomers, Visitors & guests
Filters:	Church board, Outreach, Pastor
Date Added:	September 23, 2009

Total Reader Responses: 1 (see below)

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First of all, if leaders are tracking membership as the key indicator of their church's health, they are tracking the wrong thing. Worship attendance is the most accurate, and immediate, barometer of a church's health.

But what if worship attendance begins to decline? What's the diagnostic procedure? Here are three key numbers to research:

1. Visitor Volume. The obvious but often overlooked fact is that churches need visitors to grow. Specifically, a church needs four to five percent of its average annual weekend attendance to be visitors (first, second, or third time). You may have excellent music, enlightened preaching, a great children's program, and a wonderful facility, but if you don't have enough visitors, your church won't grow.

2. Visitor Retention. This is the answer to the question: "Of the people within our ministry area who visit our church, how many stay?" The average non-growing church has a visitor retention rate of nine percent, which means that nine out of every 100 are in that church one year after their first visit. Meanwhile, growing churches average 21-percent retention. In other words, non-growing churches keep one of every 10 visitors, growing churches keep two.

3. Back Door. The average church loses five to eight percent of its constituency each year through transfer (moving out of the area), death ("promotion," as the Salvation Army calls it), and reversion (people who just stop attending). You can't do much about the first two, but a higher than normal rate of people becoming inactive may indicate the need for a better assimilation strategy.

Once you have identified these three ingredients in your "growth mix," try some forecasting. The first scenario is: "If nothing changes, where will our attendance be one year from today?" Then ask, "What would be the attendance projection if we were to double our visitor volume in the next year?" or "What if we doubled our visitor retention?" or "What if we reduced our back door by half?" or some combination of the three. There are, of course, different strategies to address different problems. But knowing the problem is the first step to finding the right solution.