{"id":15040,"date":"2007-06-22T09:34:25","date_gmt":"2007-06-22T09:34:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/2007\/06\/22\/q1\/"},"modified":"2007-06-22T09:34:25","modified_gmt":"2007-06-22T09:34:25","slug":"q1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/content\/q1\/","title":{"rendered":"How do you motivate your congregation to bring friends and family each week?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Since the vision statement of Community Christian Church is &#8220;helping people find their way back to God,&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n\n<p>So here are a couple of suggestions:<\/p>\n\n<p><strong>Ask every week.<\/strong> We often overlook the most obvious solution&mdash;ask them!  When is the last time you stood in front of your church and said, &#8220;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&#8217;t go to church to come with you?&#8221; 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.<\/p>\n  \n<p><strong>Ignite twice a year.<\/strong> Twice a year we do something we call &#8220;Ignite.&#8221;  Ignite is a combination of three key components: marketing, &#8220;wow,&#8221; and invitation.<\/p>\n\n<ul class=\"wp-block-list\">\n<li>\n<strong>Marketing.<\/strong> For Ignite, we pick a high interest Big Idea and then spend some money marketing the series to the community. We have used a lot of different types of marketing: direct mail, billboards, newspapers, door hangers, and so on. Be creative.<\/li>\n\n<li>\n<strong>&#8220;Wow.&#8221;<\/strong> The &#8220;wow&#8221; is the reaction that we want from people who visit for the very first time.  The &#8220;wow&#8221; will show up in every area of ministry&mdash;the &#8220;wow&#8221; of over-the-top hospitality from the time you pull into the parking lot to the time you leave. The &#8220;wow&#8221; will show up in our Kid&#8217;s City and cause the kids to insist that they come back next week.  The &#8220;wow&#8221; will be seen in our celebration service as we use our very best musicians and artists on those weekends.  Everyone on our staff and volunteer teams takes everything up a notch to make sure we create a &#8220;wow.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n<li>\n<strong>Invitation.<\/strong> We challenge our people to bring three people with them during the Ignite series.  We will give them high-quality invitations to put into the hands of their friends and remind them that 50 percent of all people who are asked to go to church will say &#8220;yes.&#8221;<\/li>\n\n<\/ul>\n\n<span style=\"\" class=\"\">The twice-a-year Ignite campaign helps instill the value that we are all about &#8220;helping people find their way back to God&#8221; all year long.<\/span>\n\n<p><em>(By the way, we learned a lot about Ignite from Cedar Creek Community Church in Toledo, Ohio&mdash;they are the experts and call it the BIG PUSH.)<\/em><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Since the vision statement of Community Christian Church is &#8220;helping people find their way back to God,&#8221; 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, <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.christianitytoday.com\/pastors\/content\/q1\/\">Read more&#8230;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":30,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"tax_ctp_authors":[1268],"tax_ctp_books":[],"tax_ctp_categories":[142,154],"tax_ctp_field_guide_subcategory":[],"tax_ctp_field_guides":[],"tax_ctp_format":[131],"tax_ctp_multimedia":[],"tax_ctp_point_editor":[],"tax_publications":[156],"tax_ctp_tags":[3604,3609,3615,3897],"tax_ctp_topics":[],"class_list":["post-15040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","tax_ctp_authors-dave-ferguson","tax_publications-leadership-journal","tax_ctp_tags-church-attendance","tax_ctp_tags-church-growth","tax_ctp_tags-church-membership","tax_ctp_tags-evangelism"],"acf":{"scripture_references":null},"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.9 - 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