How Churches Will Grow Post Covid.

How churches will grow post Covid. 3 areas to explore for potential growth and impact

·      Create the best kids’ ministry in your area

·      Give people opportunities to create community

·      A Digital Strategy

 The data is out and it’s not looking great for churches. According to Carey Nieuwhof and David Kinnaman the president of Barna, the latest polls are showing the average in-person church attendance is 70 to 80 percent of their pre-Covid attendance.  Most pastors these days are frustrated that their church attenders have not come back and are now wondering if they will ever come back. Covid didn’t cause this trend of people not returning to church, it simply accelerated a trend that was happening well before Covid. So, what can we do to reverse this in a post Covid world?

 Covid gave us the perfect excuse to think through what has been working well for us and what we needed to stop doing. It gave us permission to think outside the box and ask a lot of ‘Why?’ questions that we didn’t ask before because well, that’s the way we’ve always done it.

 With all that being said, here’s three key areas of potential to think through. If we get these right, I believe we will see our churches start to grow again (and become even more effective).

1.     Create the best kids’ ministry in your area

Churches that will grow post Covid will have excellent Children’s ministries. You don’t have to be the best kids’ ministry in your town, just the best in your area. It’s one of the things we do as churches that has been harder to reproduce online. It’s a ‘had to be there’ experience, and if parents want to give their kids the best possible chance of having a healthy and deep relationship with God and be around other like-minded kids, they need to bring them to church.

2.     Give people opportunities to create community

For a year and a half, we have been starved of community and people are longing to be together. Yet in a typical worship service that we’ve all been doing for the past 40 years with a welcome, worship, sermon, and maybe a closing song there is no time built into a service for community unless someone shows up early or stays late.

Churches that will grow and create impact in the future will find ways to create opportunities for community inside and outside their services. One idea to think through is how can we create groups within a service. We have been experimenting with the idea of reducing our sermon time from 40 minutes to 20 and with that 20 minutes that we saved, breaking up into groups and discussing the sermon.

That does two things: First, it helps us process what we just heard and personalize it, and the second thing it does is that it gives us opportunities to create connection. People might end up leaving that group with a new friend. And finding community is one of the 3 main reasons people come to church.

 3.     A Digital Strategy

My church has been able to hold in-person services for the past six months and during that time, our average attendance has nearly doubled. That’s in a time where most churches are 70 to 80% of what they were pre-Covid. One of the main reasons why we have grown so much is our strong digital presence. At the beginning of the pandemic, we quickly hired a part time graphic designer and videographer to make us look good and sound good online. For a year and a half every church was online in my city and probably yours as well.

During that time, people moved into your city and began to check out churches. Where do you think they checked you out first? Your online presence. And once churches re-opened back up again, guess where they went to? They went to the churches that looked and sounded good and where they feel most connected to. A strong digital strategy not only helps people online it also helps bring people into the room. The church of the future will be both physical and digital.