April 30, 2025 • 29 mins
Do pastors really know who's attending their church every week? In this episode of the Church Revitalization Podcast, A.J. Mathieu and Scott Ball dig into the common myth that "only half the church is present on any given Sunday"—and challenge assumptions about church attendance. They discuss the roots of this belief, why it persists, and, most importantly, why getting the real numbers actually matters for effective ministry and discipleship.
Learn practical ways to move beyond gut feelings and start gathering actionable data on church engagement—plus, helpful ideas for tracking attendance without burdening your team or your church members. Whether your church is large or small, knowing who's truly present is key to intentional shepherding, boosting engagement, and making better strategic decisions.
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
Don't know, Scott. I don't know if pastors really know who's attending their
church every week. I'd well, I don't think that they do. No? Alright.
Let's talk about it now on the Church Revitalization Podcast.
Hello, and welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast
brought to you by the Malphurs Group team, where each week we
tackle important, actionable topics to help churches thrive.
(00:23):
And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball and AJ
Mathieu. Welcome to
the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and cohost, AJ Mathieu.
Alright. I have a bone to pick with pastors.
Okay. Well, this is the place for it. Yeah. Those air it out
(00:45):
publicly. That's right. Let's make everyone who listens to this podcast
upset. No. Okay. So here's my here's my theory, and it's the premise of
today's episode of the podcast. My my theory
is that pastors,
like to say that half of their church only
(01:05):
half of their church is there on any given Sunday. Yeah.
I've heard it. I've heard it from from their lips to my
ears more than once. Yeah. Only about only, like, half our folks
are here. And, so I wanna do a little digging into,
like, the roots of where did this canard
come from and, why do pastors say it?
(01:28):
What's the truth And and what what should you do about
it? So that's that's the topic of today's podcast. Alright. Well, just
just another week for us solving all of the world's problems. That's
right. That's right. That's exactly right. Right. Before
we hey. Before we dive in though to this, should we do a
little shout out for, Healthy Churches Toolkit? Of course. It
(01:50):
it's a good place to start the show. It's a good place to start in
revitalization or optimization in your church. Yeah. Yeah. So
go to healthychurchestoolkit.com. If you've not, if
you don't know what it is, the healthy churches toolkit is an
online resourcing platform from our team here at the
Malthus group has all of our training around, strategic
(02:12):
envisioning, around leadership pipeline design,
around developing a biblical board. We even have a
simple seven day starter type course called,
called the church checkup challenge, which will help you kind of think about where are
the pockets of unhealth in your church. We have a vast resource
library. We have ministry centric AI
(02:34):
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So get seven days free, malphursgroup.com/toolkit, or better
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(02:57):
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gets seven days free. Check it out. Alright. And, let me tell
our, our friends outside of North America also. You can go to
healthychurchesglobal.com and register for the toolkit at
no cost. Our, our generous,
supporters and a, a portion
(03:19):
of the, of the cost paid by North American
churches helps make that available at no cost to you guys at
healthychurchesglobal.com. So do that. There you go. Do that.
Cool. Alright. Very good. Alright. So let's dive into,
this this myth. Only half of your church shows up each
week. Half of your percentage. Some, larger than
(03:41):
zero percentage. Yeah. Is coming on alternate weeks or
something to that effect. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a theory on where
this where this comes from. Yeah. All right. So my theory
is that let me take a step back and go. I have done
my research. I can officially say I have done the
requisite research. There is no there isn't a lot of good
(04:02):
data, I should say, telling us
of the people who regularly attend church. How
often do those people go to church? Yeah. There's
a lot of data on people who call themselves Christians and
how often they go to church. There's a lot of data on
how much the average person in The United
(04:25):
States say, goes to church. But of the people
who who actually do, not self proclaimed
regular attenders, but actual regular attenders, which is a different
subset. I can call myself a regular attender, but am I really? I mean, of
the people who actually regularly attend church, how often do
they regularly attend church? There's not
(04:47):
a lot. I'm not gonna say it's zero. You'll find some information out there, but
that it's not a lot of information. So where I think this myth
comes from is the large amount of
data about how often Americans go to church
or self proclaimed Christians go to church. And you see those
numbers and those numbers come in something like only 20%
(05:10):
of people who call themselves a Christian
regularly attend goes to church every week. So I think what happens
is pastors read that headline
Mhmm. And they extrapolate that out to their church
and they go, oh, probably half the people at my church. You know,
it's different. It's a different set every week. The only half of the people who
(05:33):
go to our church are there on any given Sunday. We got
people who are there a weeks and people who are there b weeks. Like, it's
a completely different set of people. Yeah. But have I have
I made that clear? Or have I said that in a way that makes any
sense? Yeah. I think so. I think so. I've yeah. I've I mean,
on several occasions, I have had pastors just really from the
(05:53):
jump even just say that. Yeah. Probably it's about half our church
attends, you know, a couple times. And I and in their mind, it's actually
really specific. Like, they actually think it's different
people there, you know, on the first and third weeks
versus the second and fourth weeks. And, you know, I mean,
I usually gently kinda push like, oh, is that what you've tracked? Is
(06:16):
that you that's what you found? And there's usually it's more of a gut
feeling. It's not it's not hard. So they'll say things like
let's say things like, well, you know, on an average
Sunday, we've we've probably got a 20 people here, but, you
know, I'd say about maybe a hundred more than that call our church
home. We got maybe 200 or 220 people who call
(06:38):
our church home. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah.
Yeah. And so here's my theory, and I'm not maybe that's true.
This is kinda not the point. But I guess the
reason why this bothers me is I don't think you really know.
Yeah. I think you're just saying that. That's more of what we're talking about today.
Do you know or do you not know? So we break this down into a
(07:00):
couple of different areas. Here, I got a let me throw in a little bit
of data here for you, Scott. I just pulled this up while we're talking. Okay.
Alright. Our church ministry analysis. We ask, how often do you
attend? Oh, yeah. Okay. And so this is now this is this is like
a best case scenario because the people, when we work with the church and they
go through the church ministry analysis, we tell them the appropriate
(07:20):
audience to take the survey. And it's not
random people in the church, you know, that just show up every now and then.
So this is leaders in the church. These are engaged people in the church. Yeah.
Known to be engaged in the church. So here's that data. This is probably a
high watermark, actually. So we've had we've had over 1,800 people take
the church ministry analysis. I don't know if you do that. It's a pretty high
number. I would have guessed it was, you know, close to that.
(07:42):
3.4% attend weekly out of that.
Mhmm. 4.7% attend every other
week. Okay. So that's
a pretty strong if you're in if you really are engaged in your church,
you are there just about weekly. And then, you know, the once a month
was less than 1%, and, and then the
(08:04):
occasional group is down there around that that area too.
So I'm not people I mean, to to your point, we're not
throwing the church ministry now church ministry
analysis out with the whole church. That's right. We're only
sending it to people who are we know already are involved. But
still I think this kind of proves my theory. And again,
(08:26):
this is just a theory. I mean, what you just shared was is real
data, but it kind of supports my theory, which is that the
less than weekly people, like the let's let's
give everybody a one week a month buffer. Let's just say
we're not calling someone who's out once a once a month a bad a
bad person, you know, or, you know, they're for whatever. They're
(08:49):
sick, A work thing. They're out of town. You can have three of them. I'm
gonna allow three a year. You're gonna allow three a year? What about me? I'm
I'm I'm I'll I'll sometimes go a whole month when I'm not
at church because I'm You're in a church. A church?
Okay. Because when we're not at our own church, we're at someone else's church. At
someone else's church. Okay. Fair enough. Pumping up their numbers.
(09:10):
Like, this is just don't count me. I don't count. I'm not in
this.
But imagine, you know, basically, you're there every week,
but you've you know, you're there's a handful of Sundays a year, maybe as much
as six or seven even that you're that you're not there for whatever reason. Vacation,
illness, work obligation, something. Okay? Kid thing. A
(09:34):
kid is sick. Mhmm. Something. Alright?
I I think that that my theory is that that's like,
in an average church, probably seventy, sixty five
at least two thirds of who's there on a Sunday
morning could be identified that way. Okay.
And and the everything less than that, the people who are only there
(09:57):
once a month, the people who are who regularly are gone twice a month, you
know, the people who only come on Easter and Christmas, that that
whole crowd makes up no more than one third
of the person who would call your church home. Okay.
So at best, if you and I are talking and you say, yeah. A hundred
people are at our church on any given Sunday, but, you know, I
(10:21):
would say about a 30 or a 40
people call our church home. I would get I would grant you that. I'd give
you a I'd give you a buffer Okay. Of, like,
thirty thirty five people. Is that fair? May I don't know. I don't know if
I'd be that generous. I would I think Oh, really? Yeah. You you think it's
even smaller? You think that the occasionals or,
(10:42):
like, once a month or type folks that that's an even smaller percentage?
Maybe so. I don't know. Like, 10% or 15%? What do you think?
Yeah. I I 66% sounds too close to 50%. We're
I mean, we're if we're myth busting the thing. Okay. You know? I mean, that's
is like, oh, what's slightly better than that. 16% among friends between
friends. Yeah. I wonder if it'd be more like 20%. Okay. Yeah. You might
(11:06):
be right. I'm trying to be generous here. But it's definitely not half.
It's not half. Like, no. I don't think it's half. I don't think it's half.
Maybe half. So Well, here here's my thing. If it was half, you
know, we asked churches for data, attendance data. Most, not
all, but most have have some okay data on that. To
me, it's a little it's too clean. If half the people because there's no way
(11:28):
it has actually worked out that, you know, half are coming
this week, half are coming you know, two weeks has half this half, two weeks
the other half. And so our attendance is always about the
same, you know? I mean Yeah. Only minor variations week to week on
attendance. I feel like if it was if people were that random, if kids were
sick that that frequently or trips happen and all that, I feel like we
(11:50):
would see everybody would end up there every now and then, and
not Easter, not not Christmas Eve. We would have these spikes.
I mean, spikes do spikes do dips do happen, but they're usually pretty predictable
around bad weather or, you know, Christmas is
over. People are kinda settling back into the groove. You know, it's
(12:10):
by the time you get to the second or third week in in January.
Everyone's like, we really ought to show up at church now. You know? Like,
life's normalized back. Beginning of the school year, everyone's gonna
start out on a new leaf, so you see these little bits of bumps. I
mean, you do see that, but it but that doesn't make it twice.
You'd go, well, if that's the case, then it should be double. But it but
(12:32):
it's not that. I'd say it's at best, it's a at best, it's a
30% bump over over the baseline. I think the numbers that you
might be seeing are real. I think if you're I don't I
think if you think you're doing better than what you're actually
counting, I think that's, a mythical gut
feeling that you have. Like, it is what it is. Almost like, you know,
(12:53):
the the the two years after COVID where people are still like, you know, our
chances down, but it's, it was it was COVID. And
now we're five years past COVID. You don't get to say that anymore. Your church
is what it is today. You know? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. We
have an actually an upcoming episode that you haven't heard yet, and we talk a
little bit about data and denominators. And there is some
(13:15):
value in knowing, like, what is that overall number
of of people who are connected to your church because you can use that
data in a different way. But I do think for a lot of other
things, that denominator of average worship attendance is
still helpful as a metric because it does kind
of characterize what your church is. And I I think this is maybe the
(13:37):
point. Actually, we're kind of circling around what you
and I both kind of agreed as the point is. It doesn't really matter
what the data would even say at the macro level. Even
if we were to know, okay, the rule of thumb is
70% or 66% or 50% or
(13:58):
20% of your folks are there
once a month and then the rest are there, you know, at least three or
three times a month. It doesn't matter because that's a generality.
What matters is your church. What about your
church? What percentage of your church is there
once a month? It's it it doesn't matter what the
(14:19):
what the I mean, except for a conversation like you and I have been
having for ten minutes. I felt like I don't know. What do you think it
is? I don't know. What do you I mean, beyond that, it it it's irrelevant.
If you are a pastor of a church, you should know Yeah. What the number
is at your church. Yeah. Yeah. It's like Jesus with
the with the apostle. But what about you? Who do you say I
(14:41):
am? Now we're gonna get into it. Yeah. That's right.
So how about that's why we titled this how big is your church, actually?
So, so let's talk about why that matters. I I think, there are a
couple of things that stand out to me, and I'll just hit
those, and then you can say what you you're thinking, AJ. First one is,
(15:02):
I think you need to identify two key groups of people
or maybe three. The first would be who are the people who really are on
the margins? Like, those people who really do, they only come once a
month. Not the percentage, the names. Give me the
names. Who are these people? The
second group of people who would be good to identify are those people
(15:25):
who who you probably think are in that category, but they
actually are there every week. But the reason why you think they're in that
category is because they don't ever move beyond Sunday morning. Yeah.
So in your head, you're like, this is a person who's not very connected. What
do you mean? They're there three out of every four
Sundays. They are there, but they've never taken a step
(15:46):
beyond Sunday morning. And so you think of them as a
flaky person, but they're there every week. Mhmm. Who are those
people? Those people who they're engaged in your church, but they
are not stepping beyond Sunday. Like, that might be the most important
group to be able to know. Yeah. And then there's the group that you
probably they're the ones that come to your mind already. They're the they're the ones
(16:07):
who are volunteering everywhere. They come to everything. You know that
they're they're every week. You probably know who these people are already. So you kinda
have these three categories, people who really are on the fringe,
and that's beyond the folks who are visitors and guests. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about people who are connected to your church on a regular basis, who's
on the fringes, who's there but not moving past Sunday,
(16:31):
and then you know you know the people. And and I guess I would just
contend that most churches have
nothing more than a gut sense about who these groups of people are.
They've not done any real work to actually get real numbers,
and you might actually be kind of disappointed. Or maybe maybe you would be
positively surprised at how many people or what the percentage is
(16:52):
that's really engaged and how often are there. Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe so.
Yeah. To me, this it all comes down to intentionality.
How intentional are we or do we want to be in discipling
people? Because you have to have this data,
you know, to really know what like, how are we doing? I guess you don't
you don't need to know you don't need to have the data to structure
(17:14):
your church in a way that makes sure nobody gets left behind,
but you do have to have the data to know where are we starting from
and are we making improvements in that. So, you know, I mean,
this is what we drive home with, you know, constantly in in
in our work is being intentional. Everything the church does should be
intentional. Towards what? Well, fulfilling the great commission. Are we are we
(17:36):
helping to make disciples? Are we helping to mature people in the
faith to become disciple makers? And the way that happens is by
having structure, having information, having
strategies, having vision, communicating well, and all
these things play in to to this piece of information right
here. Because if we don't know what's going on, we cannot
(17:58):
better do what we are called to do, to to
disciple people. So that's why it matters, and why it
shouldn't be overlooked and, we shouldn't be just going on on
gut feeling, but good information. Good information leads
to good decision making. Yeah. And I guess I would just we've we've talked
about this before, and it's an an analogy I think is really helpful.
(18:21):
The but, you know, we are called you know, if you're a pastor, you
you are called to shepherd the flock, you know, to be an under shepherd under
Jesus, to shepherd and to feed the sheep. Right? But you
feed individual sheep. You don't just feed an
abstract group of sheep. And, and the, and
the, parable that Jesus uses about
(18:44):
with the lost sheep, when he leaves the
99 and goes after the one again, I know we've talked
about this before on the podcast, but the framing of that parable
is what shepherd having 100 sheep losing
one would not leave the 99 and go get the
one. It's not it isn't a crazy love. It isn't
(19:05):
like, woah, what audacious. What an insane
thing for this shepherd to do. It's framed as a completely
normal and expected thing for the shepherd to do.
This is what a shepherd would a shepherd would leave the 99
and go and get the one. And and my contention is that there are a
lot of us who are in ministry who we don't even know. We don't know
(19:27):
who the who the hundred are, so we don't know who the one is Right.
That we should be chasing. And so that's why I just maybe this
is why it irritates me when I hear pastors go, you know, it's
probably, like, it's probably, like, 300 people who call our church. Well,
how many is it exactly? Mhmm. Because if you're a shepherd, how
many sheep are under your care? Who Yeah. Who has God called
(19:50):
you to shepherd? And There you go. I'm not holding you
accountable to knowing every I mean, it's not maybe realistic or even possible
because we're not the Lord. Didn't to know every name. But to be
so flippant about it and be like, I don't know. There's probably,
like, some beep group of people. I have no idea
who they are. Like, that that's what bothers me. It's like, we should know. This
(20:12):
is why data matters. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you wouldn't
know if one wasn't there. What would the number be, though?
20? You know? Would you notice if 20 weren't there? Would
you know if 33 were weren't there? You know? I mean,
depending on to me, I guess you're I mean, there can be some people listening
to this, AJ, who would go, well, that's why churches shouldn't be big.
(20:34):
To me, it's not a big church, small church thing because I've seen small churches
do a bad job with this too. It's obviously easier in
a smaller church to notice Mhmm. Than in a larger
church. But sometimes larger churches are better at data, and data is good.
Yep. So it's not an either or thing. It's we can
be we can be good at shepherding at any size or bad at shepherding at
(20:56):
any size. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Alright. Well, let's let's talk about what
what can we do, Scott? How can we how can we know better
where we're starting from? Because
okay. This it's not necessarily a super easy solution.
And because you actually get into, well, how does our church function? What, you
know, what size are we now? How does it function? What ministries do we
(21:19):
offer? Because there are some real barriers to
having good data,
about who is really attending. And so some of the easy ways to know
well, just I mean, a a count is great, but that doesn't tell you who.
Just tells you how many. Right. Yeah. So Sunday
school small groups ministry is a is one way to
(21:41):
know because it's in that small environment, it's not a big deal
to have more of an attendance,
taken. Children's ministry is a good way to know. But, you know, when
parents check-in kids, we're like, okay. They're here. Unless the parents
run out the door and drop the kids off at Starbucks. I guess that happens.
That is done. Whatnotnot super kind of. That's a couple of
(22:03):
ways to to maybe pull data from other places that we
can bring into the the dataset to know a little bit better.
So yeah. Sometimes it's not quite easy. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean yeah. So I'm hearing the complaints. People go, well, what's your solution
then? So, and I think you've mentioned two
good ones. I mean, like, if you were to at least start by taking
(22:27):
good attendance at your community life things
and and then correlating children's ministry check-in
data. But if you were to go, no. We wanna take this seriously, and you
wanted to go a step beyond and really start tracking, there would be a couple
of things you could do. And I'm not suggesting these things are easy, but you
could do them. One would be and I attended a large
(22:48):
church when I was in college. My parents lived in Wisconsin,
at that time. And when I was home from college, I
attended this church with them. They had no joke. Every week, they
printed off this is like a thousand people, maybe 1,200 people. It was a lot.
Crazy. They printed off name tags, like
Avery labels, for every person that
(23:11):
was on on the roster. And then you were to peel that off each
week and put it on, and wear it. And then that's
how they knew who was there and who was not there, by what
what name tags got pulled. You
know, another way to do this, you can do check-in through,
through planning center and and have have an Avery label
(23:33):
printer just like you do for children's ministry. You can do that. We're we're you
and I know of a church, that does this. It's an
international church that does this. It's a church of a couple hundred people.
So they're not, you know, it's not a church of 50. And they're doing
this. Every week, people come in and that's how they are able to
identify who a guest is too because they don't have one. And so they they
(23:54):
handwrite them, and then they put them in a system so that the next week
when they come back, they they can print their own name tag. So,
that costs money. There's that that costs something. Some
people might hear that and they're like, oh my gosh. That's that's terrible. I can't
believe anybody wanna do that. Part of me is like, it would be nice to
know people know people's names? Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't I wouldn't
(24:15):
hate it. I mean, a reward system, you know, regular Tinder, you
know, that way yeah. Yeah. Get a free get a free premium
coffee beverage. Gamify it a little bit? Yeah. Exactly. Another
way to do this that would be it's more creepy, but it's,
it's it's less less work. One of our one of our
colleagues owns a business, and
(24:38):
I'm not at least at least at the time of this recording, we don't have
an affiliate agreement. Maybe someday we would. But, he he
has a a product called Wi Fi presence,
and it connects in with your church's Wi Fi.
And so that just like when you go to McDonald's or
or Starbucks or whatever, you accept a certain type of
(25:02):
agreement when you log in to the Wi Fi for the first time. Once it
does that, it's it's pretty simple technology behind it. It's
it's IP address chat tracking. So anytime someone shows
up when a person shows up to your church and they log into your Wi
Fi, it associates that IP address with your database,
and it takes attendance for that person. So you would know not only that they
(25:24):
came, but how often they came. And so that's totally passive. It's
it's nice for the for the user in the sense that they don't
have to print a name tag or wear a name tag or whatever. But I
I mean, I recognize that that might not play in every culture. Some people might
find that to be sort of a big brother creepy
type situation. You know, we're just a stone's throw away
(25:45):
from facial recognition technology. Yeah. Sure. You know,
going more mainstream. You know, the camera over the sanctuary door would,
be checking off every face. That's that
seems a little maybe a little extreme to me. Could be could be creepy.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there are other
ways to do this. You could you can be as
(26:08):
manual with this data collection as you
want to be, and you could be as specific as you want to be. I'm
I'm just encouraging you to be more
specific and make fewer assumptions. The more that
you more that you actually know, and the less that you're just guessing the
better. Right? That's basically what we wanted to accomplish in
(26:30):
today's episode was learn a little bit
more. Get get into the seek a greater level of
information and, and then work through that with your team.
Talk about what what we really have, because
we what we would like to see is that it just leads you to make
some strategic choices. How can we better disciple people,
(26:53):
and keep people engaged? Get them engaged, keep them engaged, and,
build them up in the faith. But let's let's seek that
output from the ministries of the church, for the
purpose of unity in the church. I mean, build build up the believers.
Yeah. Those those people who are on the on the margins, how can
we minister to those people? Those people who are here
(27:15):
regularly, but but they're not moving past Sunday morning. Why?
Like, we should talk to them maybe and disciple
them differently rather than lump them into the same group as
the people who are only there once a month, because it's a different kind of
behavior. If someone's committed enough to show up more often than not, but
they're not going beyond that, you you should
(27:37):
be curious as to why that is. Are we not communicating well with them? Are
we not holding them accountable? Are we not
commute you know, telling them how we would want them to be engaged? Are
we not communicating the value of it? You know, why why would you
want to? Mhmm. All of those things.
I don't know. I mean, but my my experience has been
(27:59):
that most churches know who they're really committed people are and then kind of assume
that everybody else is flaky. And I think that there's probably more
grades of nuance in there than than most pastors are
giving credit. Yeah. I agree. Alright. Well, we
mentioned the Healthy Churches toolkit at the top of the show. So definitely go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com and, and check that out. There's seven day
(28:22):
free trial, and there's resources in there that can help you
communicate with your church better, and some things that can,
help you structure your environment to be more of a disciple
making center. So, there you go. Thanks for being with us on this
episode of the Church Revitalization podcast. There's links below
in the description on YouTube or on your,
(28:43):
podcast app that can, get you into this week's article
where, where there's all kinds of, links. There's all kinds of good stuff
over there that we produce every week that, hopefully can help
your church thrive because that's what we're all about. Thanks for being with us, everybody.
Don't know, Scott. I don't know if pastors really know who's attending their
church every week. I'd well, I don't think that they do. No? Alright.
Let's talk about it now on the Church Revitalization Podcast.
Hello, and welcome to the Church Revitalization Podcast
brought to you by the Malphurs Group team, where each week we
tackle important, actionable topics to help churches thrive.
(00:23):
And now, here's your hosts, Scott Ball and AJ
Mathieu. Welcome to
the Church Revitalization podcast. My name is Scott Ball. I'm joined by my
friend and cohost, AJ Mathieu.
Alright. I have a bone to pick with pastors.
Okay. Well, this is the place for it. Yeah. Those air it out
(00:45):
publicly. That's right. Let's make everyone who listens to this podcast
upset. No. Okay. So here's my here's my theory, and it's the premise of
today's episode of the podcast. My my theory
is that pastors,
like to say that half of their church only
(01:05):
half of their church is there on any given Sunday. Yeah.
I've heard it. I've heard it from from their lips to my
ears more than once. Yeah. Only about only, like, half our folks
are here. And, so I wanna do a little digging into,
like, the roots of where did this canard
come from and, why do pastors say it?
(01:28):
What's the truth And and what what should you do about
it? So that's that's the topic of today's podcast. Alright. Well, just
just another week for us solving all of the world's problems. That's
right. That's right. That's exactly right. Right. Before
we hey. Before we dive in though to this, should we do a
little shout out for, Healthy Churches Toolkit? Of course. It
(01:50):
it's a good place to start the show. It's a good place to start in
revitalization or optimization in your church. Yeah. Yeah. So
go to healthychurchestoolkit.com. If you've not, if
you don't know what it is, the healthy churches toolkit is an
online resourcing platform from our team here at the
Malthus group has all of our training around, strategic
(02:12):
envisioning, around leadership pipeline design,
around developing a biblical board. We even have a
simple seven day starter type course called,
called the church checkup challenge, which will help you kind of think about where are
the pockets of unhealth in your church. We have a vast resource
library. We have ministry centric AI
(02:34):
tools. We have all kinds of features in there that are
designed to save you time and to help you
streamline your ministry. So all the pain points that you feel, very
likely, there's a tool inside that toolkit that can make your life better.
So get seven days free, malphursgroup.com/toolkit, or better
yet, just go to healthychurchestoolkit.com. I always I always
(02:57):
forget that now you can just do that. Healthychurchestoolkit.com
gets seven days free. Check it out. Alright. And, let me tell
our, our friends outside of North America also. You can go to
healthychurchesglobal.com and register for the toolkit at
no cost. Our, our generous,
supporters and a, a portion
(03:19):
of the, of the cost paid by North American
churches helps make that available at no cost to you guys at
healthychurchesglobal.com. So do that. There you go. Do that.
Cool. Alright. Very good. Alright. So let's dive into,
this this myth. Only half of your church shows up each
week. Half of your percentage. Some, larger than
(03:41):
zero percentage. Yeah. Is coming on alternate weeks or
something to that effect. Yeah. Yeah. So I have a theory on where
this where this comes from. Yeah. All right. So my theory
is that let me take a step back and go. I have done
my research. I can officially say I have done the
requisite research. There is no there isn't a lot of good
(04:02):
data, I should say, telling us
of the people who regularly attend church. How
often do those people go to church? Yeah. There's
a lot of data on people who call themselves Christians and
how often they go to church. There's a lot of data on
how much the average person in The United
(04:25):
States say, goes to church. But of the people
who who actually do, not self proclaimed
regular attenders, but actual regular attenders, which is a different
subset. I can call myself a regular attender, but am I really? I mean, of
the people who actually regularly attend church, how often do
they regularly attend church? There's not
(04:47):
a lot. I'm not gonna say it's zero. You'll find some information out there, but
that it's not a lot of information. So where I think this myth
comes from is the large amount of
data about how often Americans go to church
or self proclaimed Christians go to church. And you see those
numbers and those numbers come in something like only 20%
(05:10):
of people who call themselves a Christian
regularly attend goes to church every week. So I think what happens
is pastors read that headline
Mhmm. And they extrapolate that out to their church
and they go, oh, probably half the people at my church. You know,
it's different. It's a different set every week. The only half of the people who
(05:33):
go to our church are there on any given Sunday. We got
people who are there a weeks and people who are there b weeks. Like, it's
a completely different set of people. Yeah. But have I have
I made that clear? Or have I said that in a way that makes any
sense? Yeah. I think so. I think so. I've yeah. I've I mean,
on several occasions, I have had pastors just really from the
(05:53):
jump even just say that. Yeah. Probably it's about half our church
attends, you know, a couple times. And I and in their mind, it's actually
really specific. Like, they actually think it's different
people there, you know, on the first and third weeks
versus the second and fourth weeks. And, you know, I mean,
I usually gently kinda push like, oh, is that what you've tracked? Is
(06:16):
that you that's what you found? And there's usually it's more of a gut
feeling. It's not it's not hard. So they'll say things like
let's say things like, well, you know, on an average
Sunday, we've we've probably got a 20 people here, but, you
know, I'd say about maybe a hundred more than that call our church
home. We got maybe 200 or 220 people who call
(06:38):
our church home. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah.
Yeah. And so here's my theory, and I'm not maybe that's true.
This is kinda not the point. But I guess the
reason why this bothers me is I don't think you really know.
Yeah. I think you're just saying that. That's more of what we're talking about today.
Do you know or do you not know? So we break this down into a
(07:00):
couple of different areas. Here, I got a let me throw in a little bit
of data here for you, Scott. I just pulled this up while we're talking. Okay.
Alright. Our church ministry analysis. We ask, how often do you
attend? Oh, yeah. Okay. And so this is now this is this is like
a best case scenario because the people, when we work with the church and they
go through the church ministry analysis, we tell them the appropriate
(07:20):
audience to take the survey. And it's not
random people in the church, you know, that just show up every now and then.
So this is leaders in the church. These are engaged people in the church. Yeah.
Known to be engaged in the church. So here's that data. This is probably a
high watermark, actually. So we've had we've had over 1,800 people take
the church ministry analysis. I don't know if you do that. It's a pretty high
number. I would have guessed it was, you know, close to that.
(07:42):
3.4% attend weekly out of that.
Mhmm. 4.7% attend every other
week. Okay. So that's
a pretty strong if you're in if you really are engaged in your church,
you are there just about weekly. And then, you know, the once a month
was less than 1%, and, and then the
(08:04):
occasional group is down there around that that area too.
So I'm not people I mean, to to your point, we're not
throwing the church ministry now church ministry
analysis out with the whole church. That's right. We're only
sending it to people who are we know already are involved. But
still I think this kind of proves my theory. And again,
(08:26):
this is just a theory. I mean, what you just shared was is real
data, but it kind of supports my theory, which is that the
less than weekly people, like the let's let's
give everybody a one week a month buffer. Let's just say
we're not calling someone who's out once a once a month a bad a
bad person, you know, or, you know, they're for whatever. They're
(08:49):
sick, A work thing. They're out of town. You can have three of them. I'm
gonna allow three a year. You're gonna allow three a year? What about me? I'm
I'm I'm I'll I'll sometimes go a whole month when I'm not
at church because I'm You're in a church. A church?
Okay. Because when we're not at our own church, we're at someone else's church. At
someone else's church. Okay. Fair enough. Pumping up their numbers.
(09:10):
Like, this is just don't count me. I don't count. I'm not in
this.
But imagine, you know, basically, you're there every week,
but you've you know, you're there's a handful of Sundays a year, maybe as much
as six or seven even that you're that you're not there for whatever reason. Vacation,
illness, work obligation, something. Okay? Kid thing. A
(09:34):
kid is sick. Mhmm. Something. Alright?
I I think that that my theory is that that's like,
in an average church, probably seventy, sixty five
at least two thirds of who's there on a Sunday
morning could be identified that way. Okay.
And and the everything less than that, the people who are only there
(09:57):
once a month, the people who are who regularly are gone twice a month, you
know, the people who only come on Easter and Christmas, that that
whole crowd makes up no more than one third
of the person who would call your church home. Okay.
So at best, if you and I are talking and you say, yeah. A hundred
people are at our church on any given Sunday, but, you know, I
(10:21):
would say about a 30 or a 40
people call our church home. I would get I would grant you that. I'd give
you a I'd give you a buffer Okay. Of, like,
thirty thirty five people. Is that fair? May I don't know. I don't know if
I'd be that generous. I would I think Oh, really? Yeah. You you think it's
even smaller? You think that the occasionals or,
(10:42):
like, once a month or type folks that that's an even smaller percentage?
Maybe so. I don't know. Like, 10% or 15%? What do you think?
Yeah. I I 66% sounds too close to 50%. We're
I mean, we're if we're myth busting the thing. Okay. You know? I mean, that's
is like, oh, what's slightly better than that. 16% among friends between
friends. Yeah. I wonder if it'd be more like 20%. Okay. Yeah. You might
(11:06):
be right. I'm trying to be generous here. But it's definitely not half.
It's not half. Like, no. I don't think it's half. I don't think it's half.
Maybe half. So Well, here here's my thing. If it was half, you
know, we asked churches for data, attendance data. Most, not
all, but most have have some okay data on that. To
me, it's a little it's too clean. If half the people because there's no way
(11:28):
it has actually worked out that, you know, half are coming
this week, half are coming you know, two weeks has half this half, two weeks
the other half. And so our attendance is always about the
same, you know? I mean Yeah. Only minor variations week to week on
attendance. I feel like if it was if people were that random, if kids were
sick that that frequently or trips happen and all that, I feel like we
(11:50):
would see everybody would end up there every now and then, and
not Easter, not not Christmas Eve. We would have these spikes.
I mean, spikes do spikes do dips do happen, but they're usually pretty predictable
around bad weather or, you know, Christmas is
over. People are kinda settling back into the groove. You know, it's
(12:10):
by the time you get to the second or third week in in January.
Everyone's like, we really ought to show up at church now. You know? Like,
life's normalized back. Beginning of the school year, everyone's gonna
start out on a new leaf, so you see these little bits of bumps. I
mean, you do see that, but it but that doesn't make it twice.
You'd go, well, if that's the case, then it should be double. But it but
(12:32):
it's not that. I'd say it's at best, it's a at best, it's a
30% bump over over the baseline. I think the numbers that you
might be seeing are real. I think if you're I don't I
think if you think you're doing better than what you're actually
counting, I think that's, a mythical gut
feeling that you have. Like, it is what it is. Almost like, you know,
(12:53):
the the the two years after COVID where people are still like, you know, our
chances down, but it's, it was it was COVID. And
now we're five years past COVID. You don't get to say that anymore. Your church
is what it is today. You know? Yeah. Yeah. That's true. We
have an actually an upcoming episode that you haven't heard yet, and we talk a
little bit about data and denominators. And there is some
(13:15):
value in knowing, like, what is that overall number
of of people who are connected to your church because you can use that
data in a different way. But I do think for a lot of other
things, that denominator of average worship attendance is
still helpful as a metric because it does kind
of characterize what your church is. And I I think this is maybe the
(13:37):
point. Actually, we're kind of circling around what you
and I both kind of agreed as the point is. It doesn't really matter
what the data would even say at the macro level. Even
if we were to know, okay, the rule of thumb is
70% or 66% or 50% or
(13:58):
20% of your folks are there
once a month and then the rest are there, you know, at least three or
three times a month. It doesn't matter because that's a generality.
What matters is your church. What about your
church? What percentage of your church is there
once a month? It's it it doesn't matter what the
(14:19):
what the I mean, except for a conversation like you and I have been
having for ten minutes. I felt like I don't know. What do you think it
is? I don't know. What do you I mean, beyond that, it it it's irrelevant.
If you are a pastor of a church, you should know Yeah. What the number
is at your church. Yeah. Yeah. It's like Jesus with
the with the apostle. But what about you? Who do you say I
(14:41):
am? Now we're gonna get into it. Yeah. That's right.
So how about that's why we titled this how big is your church, actually?
So, so let's talk about why that matters. I I think, there are a
couple of things that stand out to me, and I'll just hit
those, and then you can say what you you're thinking, AJ. First one is,
(15:02):
I think you need to identify two key groups of people
or maybe three. The first would be who are the people who really are on
the margins? Like, those people who really do, they only come once a
month. Not the percentage, the names. Give me the
names. Who are these people? The
second group of people who would be good to identify are those people
(15:25):
who who you probably think are in that category, but they
actually are there every week. But the reason why you think they're in that
category is because they don't ever move beyond Sunday morning. Yeah.
So in your head, you're like, this is a person who's not very connected. What
do you mean? They're there three out of every four
Sundays. They are there, but they've never taken a step
(15:46):
beyond Sunday morning. And so you think of them as a
flaky person, but they're there every week. Mhmm. Who are those
people? Those people who they're engaged in your church, but they
are not stepping beyond Sunday. Like, that might be the most important
group to be able to know. Yeah. And then there's the group that you
probably they're the ones that come to your mind already. They're the they're the ones
(16:07):
who are volunteering everywhere. They come to everything. You know that
they're they're every week. You probably know who these people are already. So you kinda
have these three categories, people who really are on the fringe,
and that's beyond the folks who are visitors and guests. I'm not talking about that.
I'm talking about people who are connected to your church on a regular basis, who's
on the fringes, who's there but not moving past Sunday,
(16:31):
and then you know you know the people. And and I guess I would just
contend that most churches have
nothing more than a gut sense about who these groups of people are.
They've not done any real work to actually get real numbers,
and you might actually be kind of disappointed. Or maybe maybe you would be
positively surprised at how many people or what the percentage is
(16:52):
that's really engaged and how often are there. Yeah. Maybe so. Maybe so.
Yeah. To me, this it all comes down to intentionality.
How intentional are we or do we want to be in discipling
people? Because you have to have this data,
you know, to really know what like, how are we doing? I guess you don't
you don't need to know you don't need to have the data to structure
(17:14):
your church in a way that makes sure nobody gets left behind,
but you do have to have the data to know where are we starting from
and are we making improvements in that. So, you know, I mean,
this is what we drive home with, you know, constantly in in
in our work is being intentional. Everything the church does should be
intentional. Towards what? Well, fulfilling the great commission. Are we are we
(17:36):
helping to make disciples? Are we helping to mature people in the
faith to become disciple makers? And the way that happens is by
having structure, having information, having
strategies, having vision, communicating well, and all
these things play in to to this piece of information right
here. Because if we don't know what's going on, we cannot
(17:58):
better do what we are called to do, to to
disciple people. So that's why it matters, and why it
shouldn't be overlooked and, we shouldn't be just going on on
gut feeling, but good information. Good information leads
to good decision making. Yeah. And I guess I would just we've we've talked
about this before, and it's an an analogy I think is really helpful.
(18:21):
The but, you know, we are called you know, if you're a pastor, you
you are called to shepherd the flock, you know, to be an under shepherd under
Jesus, to shepherd and to feed the sheep. Right? But you
feed individual sheep. You don't just feed an
abstract group of sheep. And, and the, and
the, parable that Jesus uses about
(18:44):
with the lost sheep, when he leaves the
99 and goes after the one again, I know we've talked
about this before on the podcast, but the framing of that parable
is what shepherd having 100 sheep losing
one would not leave the 99 and go get the
one. It's not it isn't a crazy love. It isn't
(19:05):
like, woah, what audacious. What an insane
thing for this shepherd to do. It's framed as a completely
normal and expected thing for the shepherd to do.
This is what a shepherd would a shepherd would leave the 99
and go and get the one. And and my contention is that there are a
lot of us who are in ministry who we don't even know. We don't know
(19:27):
who the who the hundred are, so we don't know who the one is Right.
That we should be chasing. And so that's why I just maybe this
is why it irritates me when I hear pastors go, you know, it's
probably, like, it's probably, like, 300 people who call our church. Well,
how many is it exactly? Mhmm. Because if you're a shepherd, how
many sheep are under your care? Who Yeah. Who has God called
(19:50):
you to shepherd? And There you go. I'm not holding you
accountable to knowing every I mean, it's not maybe realistic or even possible
because we're not the Lord. Didn't to know every name. But to be
so flippant about it and be like, I don't know. There's probably,
like, some beep group of people. I have no idea
who they are. Like, that that's what bothers me. It's like, we should know. This
(20:12):
is why data matters. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Maybe you wouldn't
know if one wasn't there. What would the number be, though?
20? You know? Would you notice if 20 weren't there? Would
you know if 33 were weren't there? You know? I mean,
depending on to me, I guess you're I mean, there can be some people listening
to this, AJ, who would go, well, that's why churches shouldn't be big.
(20:34):
To me, it's not a big church, small church thing because I've seen small churches
do a bad job with this too. It's obviously easier in
a smaller church to notice Mhmm. Than in a larger
church. But sometimes larger churches are better at data, and data is good.
Yep. So it's not an either or thing. It's we can
be we can be good at shepherding at any size or bad at shepherding at
(20:56):
any size. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Alright. Well, let's let's talk about what
what can we do, Scott? How can we how can we know better
where we're starting from? Because
okay. This it's not necessarily a super easy solution.
And because you actually get into, well, how does our church function? What, you
know, what size are we now? How does it function? What ministries do we
(21:19):
offer? Because there are some real barriers to
having good data,
about who is really attending. And so some of the easy ways to know
well, just I mean, a a count is great, but that doesn't tell you who.
Just tells you how many. Right. Yeah. So Sunday
school small groups ministry is a is one way to
(21:41):
know because it's in that small environment, it's not a big deal
to have more of an attendance,
taken. Children's ministry is a good way to know. But, you know, when
parents check-in kids, we're like, okay. They're here. Unless the parents
run out the door and drop the kids off at Starbucks. I guess that happens.
That is done. Whatnotnot super kind of. That's a couple of
(22:03):
ways to to maybe pull data from other places that we
can bring into the the dataset to know a little bit better.
So yeah. Sometimes it's not quite easy. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean yeah. So I'm hearing the complaints. People go, well, what's your solution
then? So, and I think you've mentioned two
good ones. I mean, like, if you were to at least start by taking
(22:27):
good attendance at your community life things
and and then correlating children's ministry check-in
data. But if you were to go, no. We wanna take this seriously, and you
wanted to go a step beyond and really start tracking, there would be a couple
of things you could do. And I'm not suggesting these things are easy, but you
could do them. One would be and I attended a large
(22:48):
church when I was in college. My parents lived in Wisconsin,
at that time. And when I was home from college, I
attended this church with them. They had no joke. Every week, they
printed off this is like a thousand people, maybe 1,200 people. It was a lot.
Crazy. They printed off name tags, like
Avery labels, for every person that
(23:11):
was on on the roster. And then you were to peel that off each
week and put it on, and wear it. And then that's
how they knew who was there and who was not there, by what
what name tags got pulled. You
know, another way to do this, you can do check-in through,
through planning center and and have have an Avery label
(23:33):
printer just like you do for children's ministry. You can do that. We're we're you
and I know of a church, that does this. It's an
international church that does this. It's a church of a couple hundred people.
So they're not, you know, it's not a church of 50. And they're doing
this. Every week, people come in and that's how they are able to
identify who a guest is too because they don't have one. And so they they
(23:54):
handwrite them, and then they put them in a system so that the next week
when they come back, they they can print their own name tag. So,
that costs money. There's that that costs something. Some
people might hear that and they're like, oh my gosh. That's that's terrible. I can't
believe anybody wanna do that. Part of me is like, it would be nice to
know people know people's names? Yeah. Yeah. I wouldn't I wouldn't
(24:15):
hate it. I mean, a reward system, you know, regular Tinder, you
know, that way yeah. Yeah. Get a free get a free premium
coffee beverage. Gamify it a little bit? Yeah. Exactly. Another
way to do this that would be it's more creepy, but it's,
it's it's less less work. One of our one of our
colleagues owns a business, and
(24:38):
I'm not at least at least at the time of this recording, we don't have
an affiliate agreement. Maybe someday we would. But, he he
has a a product called Wi Fi presence,
and it connects in with your church's Wi Fi.
And so that just like when you go to McDonald's or
or Starbucks or whatever, you accept a certain type of
(25:02):
agreement when you log in to the Wi Fi for the first time. Once it
does that, it's it's pretty simple technology behind it. It's
it's IP address chat tracking. So anytime someone shows
up when a person shows up to your church and they log into your Wi
Fi, it associates that IP address with your database,
and it takes attendance for that person. So you would know not only that they
(25:24):
came, but how often they came. And so that's totally passive. It's
it's nice for the for the user in the sense that they don't
have to print a name tag or wear a name tag or whatever. But I
I mean, I recognize that that might not play in every culture. Some people might
find that to be sort of a big brother creepy
type situation. You know, we're just a stone's throw away
(25:45):
from facial recognition technology. Yeah. Sure. You know,
going more mainstream. You know, the camera over the sanctuary door would,
be checking off every face. That's that
seems a little maybe a little extreme to me. Could be could be creepy.
Yeah. Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there are other
ways to do this. You could you can be as
(26:08):
manual with this data collection as you
want to be, and you could be as specific as you want to be. I'm
I'm just encouraging you to be more
specific and make fewer assumptions. The more that
you more that you actually know, and the less that you're just guessing the
better. Right? That's basically what we wanted to accomplish in
(26:30):
today's episode was learn a little bit
more. Get get into the seek a greater level of
information and, and then work through that with your team.
Talk about what what we really have, because
we what we would like to see is that it just leads you to make
some strategic choices. How can we better disciple people,
(26:53):
and keep people engaged? Get them engaged, keep them engaged, and,
build them up in the faith. But let's let's seek that
output from the ministries of the church, for the
purpose of unity in the church. I mean, build build up the believers.
Yeah. Those those people who are on the on the margins, how can
we minister to those people? Those people who are here
(27:15):
regularly, but but they're not moving past Sunday morning. Why?
Like, we should talk to them maybe and disciple
them differently rather than lump them into the same group as
the people who are only there once a month, because it's a different kind of
behavior. If someone's committed enough to show up more often than not, but
they're not going beyond that, you you should
(27:37):
be curious as to why that is. Are we not communicating well with them? Are
we not holding them accountable? Are we not
commute you know, telling them how we would want them to be engaged? Are
we not communicating the value of it? You know, why why would you
want to? Mhmm. All of those things.
I don't know. I mean, but my my experience has been
(27:59):
that most churches know who they're really committed people are and then kind of assume
that everybody else is flaky. And I think that there's probably more
grades of nuance in there than than most pastors are
giving credit. Yeah. I agree. Alright. Well, we
mentioned the Healthy Churches toolkit at the top of the show. So definitely go to
healthychurchestoolkit.com and, and check that out. There's seven day
(28:22):
free trial, and there's resources in there that can help you
communicate with your church better, and some things that can,
help you structure your environment to be more of a disciple
making center. So, there you go. Thanks for being with us on this
episode of the Church Revitalization podcast. There's links below
in the description on YouTube or on your,
(28:43):
podcast app that can, get you into this week's article
where, where there's all kinds of, links. There's all kinds of good stuff
over there that we produce every week that, hopefully can help
your church thrive because that's what we're all about. Thanks for being with us, everybody.
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