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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 ...

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