Want more on Assimilation of Visitors? Sticky Church is a website that contains lots of good resources. October 6-7 is a conference that you might want to attend:
See: www.stickychurch.com
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I finished reading
Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church.
This book is sure to be on the top of the list for Visitor Assimilation texts.
Note: I read Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church, Gary McIntosh (see my review at Assimilating Church Visitors- Beyond the First Visit).
To make a comparison between the two books is like comparing a Ferrari to a Escort.
There are several key elements to Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church that have made their visitor retention rate so astronomical.
I write about one idea for Survey First Time Visitors.
The entire process is laid out simply in their book (along with lots of shameless plugs for Searcy’s other materials).
His beginning point is to recognize that in God’s sovereignty, every visitor is a Gift to your church. They didn’t show up by chance. But rather, as a gift, and “first time gifts full of unparalleled potential.”
How can we turn them into developing members?
“By sending that guest to you, God is giving you the privilege of cooperating with Him to move someone forward in their journey toward Jesus.”
Searcy leads us on a practical exercise. If you are reading this, think about your church. To help you bench mark, statistics suggest that each year a church needs to keep
Considering your church, how many guests do you need to keep each year?
What is your retention ratio? More specifically, here are 6 facts to dig up for your church
How many visitor you keep?
The basic assimilation system that is presented in Fusion is a simple (in overview anyway).
The entire rest of the book explores this process and system as it has developed at The Journey church.
The temptation will be to simply buy the book and implement the process as if the process is the key that will solve all your visitor retention problems. That is systems thinking and treating this system as the next big thing. Searcy concedes “the church is not a business,” yet in the same sentence adds “[but] we would be smart to take some cues from the consumer-conscious service world.” This is a solid “nuts and bolts” resource for congregations and ministries alike.
You will need to tweak it for your local context. For example, their process is very dependent upon email and it is of utmost priority to capture email addresses from their visitors. Their system depends on it. Yet some of you may have churches in areas and with people who still don’t use email. How will you adjust the system to your context?
There are so many variables in visitor retention, including the system. Others include the friendliness of the congregation, presentation of the facilities, and more. This book is not the magic happy pill to solve your visitor retention problems, but rather provides a step by step system to at least help with the data gathering and processing to help you “process” visitors. Of the books I have read on visitor retention, this one presents the best system I have seen.
Order your copy of Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church direct from Amazon.
If you would like live training or consulting about evaluating your hospitality, check out our articles on hospitality and feel free to give us a call at 804-335-1445. Send an email to and I will send you a hospitality audit form.
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Stop Being a Friendly Church challenges the church with an interesting twist on hospitality (thanks to Tony Whitaker for highlighting this in the April Web Evangelism Bulletin). Essentialy, quit trying to be a “friendly church” and be a church “where you can make friends.” There is a big difference and the article points out how.
Two items from the Web Evangelism Bulletin:
Southern Baptists statistics report a decline in the Number of Baptisms. According to the Annual Church Profile (ACP) compiled by LifeWay Christian Resources, baptisms in 2007 for the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) dropped nearly 5.5 percent to 345,941. That number compares to 364,826 the previous year. According to the report’s author, many factors contribute to the decline. But in response, he says local churches must make the Great Commission a priority. Evangelism will be a key topic at the upcoming SBC annual meeting in Indianapolis in June. During the meeting, the SBC is expected to unveil a ten-year evangelism strategy. The report also showed that total mission expenditures topped $1.3 billion last year.
Have a great weekend.
PS: If you have not taken our reader survey, chime in and get a free download on evangelism definitions.
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What kind of impression do visitors get when they come into your church for the first time? Every church thinks it’s friendly.
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But I and many others have experienced the fear factor of walking into an unknown place and knowing immediately that we don’t fit and are not really welcome to remain. (Download: Avoiding First Time Visitor Nightmares.)
During my last book buying binge (to add to the six overloaded bookshelves on evangelism), I picked up two specifically on assimilating visitors, or how to welcome and help visitors join your church community.
The first one I have already finished. Gary McIntosh’s
Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church. (Click image or link to order yours direct from Amazon).
The cover promises to offer the reader a complete guide to church hospitality, and is written by well know church growth scholar Gary McIntosh.
If you have NEVER picked up a book on welcoming visitors, this can be a helpful introduction.
This book does have some strengths in looking at the visitor flow of your church.
But there are better books on the market (a preview of what I’m reading now — I’m really jazzed about it).
McIntosth begins with reminder of how important it is for churches to welcome the visitors that come.
He asks: How do you react differently between a guest and a visitor?
A guest is invited, expected, and thus you make sure the house is clean and in order.
A visitor shows up unexpectedly, uninvited, and typically when you’re doing laundry or dressed in your painting clothes.
McIntosh encourages the church to think through how it welcomes guests, to review what it thinks about guests, and to encourage churches to see themselves through the eyes of a guest.
In the 2nd chapter, he reminds of how to be a great host. Welcoming guests doesn’t happen accidentally, but on purpose with some careful planning and attention to the process (which is where a consultant can help you).
He cites research from the 80s that churches need to keep 25 to 30 percent of their first time visitors to grow rapidly, while churches that only keep 5 to 8 percent will decline.
Assuming those numbers are still current, let’s settle on a average of 16%. How many visitors does your church need to grow?
What is the first impression of your parking lot, your building.
Signage? Check out these church signs I found of churches — what do they communicate?
Upkeep of the Building? What does this communicate?
First impressions — Do visitors have a positive interaction with the people in the church?
Though McIntosh offers some excellent advice, most of it is clearly dated, and most of the supporting research is from the early 1990s. Most all the footnotes cite citations before the year 1995, the majority of which stretch all the way back to the 70s. I kept feeling like I was reading late 1980s church growth stuff all over again.
Our society may have changed, but this book doesn’t have any current research to make sure those conclusions are still valid.
I’ve read widely on assimilating visitors, and if you have as well, you’ll find this book disappointing.
It has a throw away chapter about the emergent church that feels like an attempt at being current and not really relevant to the book. A few times I had to persevere through rabbit trails that had very little to do with welcoming visitors (for example, a whole chapter on launching new ministries).
Gary McIntosh’s Beyond the First Visit: The Complete Guide to Connecting Guests to Your Church. (Click image or link to order yours direct from Amazon).
Fit your evangelism style to your personality
Contagious Christian - Evangelism Book Review
God is at work -- Do you see it?
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Update: Read my review here: Fusion Visitor Assimilation. I think this is the best assimilation book available right now. I’ve not read Sticky Church, but that is next on the list.
A new book has been released about turning Visitors into Members, also known as visitor assimilation.
Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church (Order yours from Amazon). This was written by the founding pastor of a new church plant in New York city (The Journey Church) and the lessons they learned while getting their church off the ground.
From Amazon’s description:
All church leaders have faced the questions that arrive with newcomers: Do they feel comfortable? Is there more we could do to serve them? Will they want to come back? Creating an environment that both embraces our newcomers and excites them enough to return does not happen by chance. We must be prepared to be effective stewards of the newcomers God brings us. And, why shouldn’t the Church be the epitome of service at its best, as modeled by the greatest server of all time? Built on The Journey Church of the City’s Assimilation Seminar, Fusion embodies a step-by-step, biblically grounded, tested and proven plan for establishing a relationship with newcomers that ultimately prompts them to become fully developing members of our congregations. This innovative, practical guide is full of how-to information, testimonials from the recently assimilated and from participating church leaders, examples of the assimilation materials used and check points to make sure the reader is on track. Engaging, informative and immediately applicable, here is help for setting newcomers on the path toward true life transformation and spiritual maturity.
Reviews of the book at Amazon have been highly favorable. I’ll be adding this one to my list to read.
Order your copy of Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church from Amazon.
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God sovereignly brings visitors to your church.
They can fall in a variety of categories:
Source: Breaking the Missional Code, Ed Stetzer, David Putman
But once people are first welcomed into your church, and the service is over, then what?
The need to build bridges - a conversion to the church.
I see a big difference between Latin Culture, African American Culture, and typical North American Suburban Culture. In the latter, we see the death of sense of relational community.
Growing up, my community had a pool and a dock (as it was waterfront). My last subdivision — we only knew one neighbor.
When we were first married and moved to Chicago, we started attending an Assembly of God and went to a Sunday school class for married couples, and socializing after the class, we had lots of things in common with 3 other couples: newlywed transplants from another state.
Then the phone calls began to happen.
Pretty soon, three things began to happen as we spent time together.
(1) We felt connected to the local church.
(2) We developed deep and intimate friendships that are now 15 years old.
This got started because someone took the initiative to get us together and we met over a meal and played cards. An act of hospitality.
How to help visitors connect:
What methods do you use to help visitors connect with your church?
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Every now and then, we lift up an article on welcoming visitors. It’s not evangelism as we define evangelism here, but it is part of the responsibility of the church to welcome those that God draws to your church so that the gospel can be heard, seen, or felt. (See Avoiding First Time Visitor Nightmares, our hospitality to visitors series, Church Hospitality Assessment, or see the category of visitors) 
A few years ago attended a seminar dinner on How to Minister to Visitors at the local church and we learned some great ideas that are worth sharing here.
Perhaps these can help you minister to the people God brings to your church through your invitation or through His own sovereign means.
Miracles disguised as needs.
When unchurched visitors come to church, it is highly likely that they are looking for God to do something in their life.
Our speaker challenged us to look at our visitors as “miracles disguised as needs.”
A different meet and greet. Take the Risk and Pray.
After introducing ourselves with a simple “I’ve not met you yet, my name is . . . . .” and finding out a little about them, we can simply ask “Is there something we can pray for before you go?”
Or, they may have already shared some of their needs and you can say “Let’s pray about some of those needs right now,” and then plunge right in and pray with them, leaving it up to God to work sovereignly.
Your prayer doesn’t have to be elaborate or drawn out, but a simple lifting of the person’s needs to the Lord.
This communicates a few things: care and compassion for the visitor, demonstrates our reliance upon God, and possibly reflects the “culture” of your church.
If our visitor sees an answer to prayer in the course of time, God might use that to draw that person or family closer to him. This is really a process of listening evangelism, and trusting in the power of God for daily living. You’re not really “selling our church” or actively recruiting people.
We’re simply partnering with them and taking them before the Lord.
After a time of prayer, if its appropriate, spend some time introducing the visitor to other people, and then if they return in the following week or two, welcome them again and continue to communicate care and concern. See how God worked in response to prayer and see what happens.
Simply put, this idea is really simple to implement.
What does it take for you to participate?
This is a form of outreach that uses hospitality and prayer to bless those who come to your for their first time.
Sounds simple, but I think you’ll find it an adventure.
What are we communicating in our evangelism conversations?
Evangelism Encounter: "I'd rather invite them to a manure shoveling party than to church."
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