Jump directly to the Content

How do you motivate your congregation to bring friends and family each week?

Dave Ferguson is lead pastor of Community Christian Church, a multi-site, missional community in the Chicagoland area.

Since the vision statement of Community Christian Church is "helping people find their way back to God," we spend a lot of time dreaming, discussing, and talking about how we can do a better job of motivating our people to invite their friends, family, neighbors, and co-workers. As a result, during the last eight years, we have grown from 700 people in attendance to 5,000 people.

So here are a couple of suggestions:

Ask every week. We often overlook the most obvious solution—ask them! When is the last time you stood in front of your church and said, "Next week is going to be a great series to invite your friends, neighbors, family and co-workers to join you. Will you join me and ask someone who doesn't go to church to come with you?" We complain that people in our churches do not invite others, but do we ask them? Just about every week we ask our people to invite and include new people.

Ignite twice a year. Twice a year we do something we call "Ignite." Ignite is a combination of ...

April
Support Our Work

Subscribe to CT for less than $4.25/month

Homepage Subscription Panel

Read These Next

Related
Growing a Rural Church
Growing a Rural Church
Who says you can't raise strong congregations in country fields?
From the Magazine
Fractured Are the Peacemakers
Fractured Are the Peacemakers
A Christian reconciliation group in Israel and Palestine warned that war would come. Now the war threatens their relevance.
Editor's Pick
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
Understanding God and our world needs more than bare reason and experience.
close