You don’t need more visitors

I didn’t know this at the time, but this is just about the national average. I did a survey where I asked five hundred churches:

• How many visit your church?
• How many join your church?
• How many attend your church?
• How many attended a year ago?

Based on the input from five hundred churches, I discovered that our numbers where just about the national average. On average, 87% of the people who visit our churches do not join those churches. You see, we think our problem is we can’t get people to come to church. That is, in fact, not our problem. Our problem is not that we can’t get them to come to church. Our problem is they have been to church. And, in many cases they don’t want to come back.

The question is, does coffee cake really make a difference? Does it make a quantifiable difference that you can actually see? Well, look carefully at the chart above. It is the blue slice we are interested in. That is the number of people who joined without coffee cake. With coffee cake, the blue slice looks like the second chart.

Same pastor, same church, same music, same preschool, same order of worship, same landscaping, same building. The only difference was the coffee cake.

Some people ask me, “What do you put in that coffee cake?” What you put in that coffee cake is L.O.V.E. You love people in common, ordinary, pedestrian ways and their heart will begin to warm up to a message about a God who loves them. All at once, things will start changing. If you will be their friend, their heart will warm up to a message about, “What a friend we have in Jesus.”
Josh Hunt. Christian Hospitality.