Have you ever considered why some churches grow while others decline?

What is it that seems to drive some churches to make a difference and reach more people while others struggle to keep the doors open?

This will be a year of incredible breakthroughs in some churches while others will find themselves at the beginning of eventual decline; even more churches across the country will close.

In the coming year, there will be leaders reading this post that will look back and remark at how amazing it was to have reached more people and to have seen them get plugged in, while others will look back and be shocked that their church is in a plateau or decline. My assumption is if you are reading this article that you’re a church leader who cares deeply for your church and you want to see it thrive!

Are you investing time, effort, and energy to wrestle through what will help your church to breakthrough to a brand-new level this year? I know that you love your church, but what are you doing to study and grow as a leader regarding church growth?

I want this year to be the year that your church reaches more people than ever before. For this entire month, we are taking some time to focus on helping your church grow. To kick things off, here are seven facts about church growth that may cause you to reconsider some of your assumptions.

94% of all churches are losing ground against the communities they serve. [ref]

You might have read or heard the more “encouraging” version of this statistic, which states that 80% of churches are in plateau or decline [ref], but it’s actually much worse than that! There are churches that are growing, but they’re not growing as quickly as the communities they serve. For years, we’ve focused on churches that grow in thriving suburban communities, and I wonder if that has stunted our growth. Maybe we’ve fooled ourselves into thinking that those churches are really making an impact when really all they’re doing is growing because the community around them is growing. Only a small fraction of churches are growing faster than the communities they serve. We need to reverse this trend!

We need your church to grow faster than the community you serve. If it isn’t growing faster than that, the message of Christ is losing ground in our culture. The stakes are very high.

Only 2% of people in your church will invite a friend to church this year unless you do something about it.[ref]

If this year is like last year, most people in your church will not invite anyone to come with them to church.

As leaders who care deeply about reaching the community, we need to think long and hard about this number. This is an incredibly sad statistic and is reflective of a larger issue of a disengaged community. It’s our role to try to encourage our people to become more engaged in the mission by inviting their friends and family to come and be a part of the church.

While inviting people to church is not the totality of what engagement looks like, it is an incredibly important piece of the puzzle when we think about reaching and impacting our community. Churches that are making an impact are full of people who are inviting friends...