Tuesday 20 August 2013

Growing a Church: Connecting...

Once somebody has stepped towards us by giving in a ‘Like to Know More’ form, we will put real effort into trying to help them connect to church life.  The next day - on the Monday - their details will go onto our database. It’s where we record our ‘crowd’, our new people list, and at this point they will be sent a standard letter that thanks them for coming to King’s. On the Tuesday evening our integration team meets at the church office – usually four church members and the team leader. We phone every new person who gave in a form - they will get a phone call asking them, ‘How can we help you further to connect with the church?  What would you like to do?  Would you like to get involved in Alpha?  How about a mid-week group?’  The integration team will have information about all such groups and all the particular ministries.


Our integration team members are selected because they are friendly and can deal with people easily. They will have up-to-date, relevant information ready to pass on to the new person each week.  This process has been going on for some years now and before we started doing it this way we would see perhaps 25% of our new people connecting here and continuing to attend.  After we started doing it, that rate increased to 50% at times and has generally stayed at around 40% of the new people who fill out the form and step towards us in that way. Many others choose to stay in the crowd.