Predicting Your Worship Attendance for the Next Year

Can you really predict your church’s worship attendance for the next year? Our answer is “maybe.”

I know such certainty gives you a lot of comfort!

Here’s the reality: the answer is in God’s hands. His Spirit can move as He pleases.

So why would we even attempt to project worship attendance? It’s a fair question.

Looking at Correlates

At the risk of boring you, allow me to explain the issue of correlates. A correlate is two or more factors that seem to affect each other. For example, we might say that drug use is a significant correlate of property crime.

We cannot necessarily prove that drug use causes property crime, but drug use is often pervasive when you look at data on property crime.

Back to Church Issues

We often look at correlates to help us understand church practices. And we can say confidently that some common factors are present in churches where the attendance is growing, particularly if the annual attendance growth rate is 10 percent or higher.

The big picture for growth in churches is Great Commission obedience. But that factor is general and can be vague. The question we sought to answer is, How does the church obey the Great Commission most effectively?

For example, we’ve learned that the frequency of evangelism activity in your church is a highly important correlate to your church’s attendance growth over the next year.

Predicting Attendance Growth in Your Church

We created a free tool that can help you predict growth (or decline) in your church for the next year. You can get it here: https://churchanswers.com/grow.

It is a fallible tool, but we still think it is a useful tool. It will take you about 10 minutes to complete and score.

While we hope the tool is interesting, our greater hope is that the tool can be useful for seeing Great Commission growth in your church.

Answer the questions as accurately as possible. The questions themselves are based on correlates, so you can immediately see where improvements are possible.

Let Us Hear from You

After you’ve completed the tool, we would love to hear from you. We are always in a learning posture, so your feedback is helpful to us.

Even more importantly, your feedback is helpful for the Kingdom.

And that’s what really matters.

https://churchanswers.com/grow

 

Posted on April 10, 2023

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With nearly 40 years of ministry experience, Thom Rainer has spent a lifetime committed to the growth and health of local churches across North America.
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