Most churches are overspending on visibility and under-investing in invitations.

In the late 1900s I ran a dot-com back when saying “I run a dot-com” got you a seat at the cool table.

We obsessed over our branding. Fancy logo. Perfect domain. Debated five kinds of red like our lives depended on hex codes. Launch day came and… crickets.

Why? We were doing marketing when we should’ve been doing conversations. The growth strategy wasn’t a new shade of crimson; it was getting out of the building and talking to customers.

Churches make the same mistake. We assume the next Facebook hack, TikTok trend, or website refresh will push us over the top. But the channel we’re ignoring is sitting right in front of us every Sunday: people who personally invite people. The data has been shouting this for years: personal invitations beat paid reach … in effectiveness, in trust, and in retention.

You don’t need a new logo, Google Ads, or a slicker site. You need to build inviters.

If you want durable and compounding growth, stop buying marketing and start building inviters.

Call it Invite Propensity, the percentage of attenders who invite someone in a given period. It’s the church’s NPS (Net Promoter Score): a simple human metric that predicts future growth better than vanity numbers (impressions, followers, even raw attendance). When invite propensity rises, everything compounds — first-time guests, baptisms, small-group participation — because invitation rides on the rails of relationship, the most trusted medium on earth.

We live in the attention recession. More posts, more reels, more ads, but diminishing returns. Meanwhile, trust in institutional messaging lags far behind trust in people we actually know. According to Nielsen’s global survey, recommendations from friends and family are the most trusted form of promotion, outranking every ad channel by a mile. [ref] McKinsey adds that word-of-mouth drives 20–50% of decisions, cutting through the noise in ways paid media can’t. [ref]

Translation for church leaders: the most persuasive “ad” for your church isn’t an ad. It’s a friend who says, “Sit with me.”

And it’s not just first-touch effectiveness. It’s stickiness. People who come through relationships are more likely to stay because relationships are the glue. Research on assimilation shows that those who remain active long-term average seven new friendships; those who drift away average fewer than two. [ref]

Friends don’t just get people in the door … they keep connected to the church long term.

None of this requires marketing spending or media buy. It requires a robust invite culture.

Invite Propensity is the share of your congregation that has personally invited someone in the last 90 days.

Why it matters:

If 12% of your people invite one person per quarter and half of the invitees show up, that’s a 6% quarterly lift in first-time guests before a single ad dollar is spent. If 30% of those guests connect into groups or serve via relational bridges, you’ve just shifted the growth curve … with trust, not spend.

Should you stop all advertising? Not necessarily. Paid media can prime the pump—but the conversion happens in the relationship. Ads can raise awareness; people create action.

Here’s the uncomfortable math:

Through decades of studies, personal invitations outperform advertising by an order of magnitude. The Institute for American Church Growth found that nearly 79% of first-time guests came because someone they knew invited them, while programs, ads, and special events accounted for single-digit percentages. [ref] Meanwhile, McKinsey estimates that 20–50% of all consumer decisions … in every sector .. are driven by word-of-mouth influence. [ref]

That’s at least 10x more effective than most paid channels.

So, if invitations are roughly 10x more powerful than marketing, then … logically … you should be investing 10x more in building an invite culture than investing in marketing and ads.

That doesn’t mean kill your marketing budget. It means repurpose it. Your spending should follow your strategy:

1. Training (Staff & Systems)

Most churches don’t have a marketing problem…they have a discipleship problem disguised as one. The job of your staff isn’t to post better; it’s to prompt better. Train your team to infuse invitation into every department: kids, worship, groups, and guest services. “How does this help people bring a friend?” should become a standing meeting question. That’s your new creative brief.

Budget for leadership development, invite-culture workshops, and ongoing coaching that helps your staff stay focused on mobilizing inviters, not managing impressions.

2. Equipping (Tools for the Congregation)

People want to invite; they just don’t know how. Make it stupidly easy. The most effective churches lower friction with shareable tools—physical and digital. Think:

Budget for creative production that serves your members as marketers, not your brand as a product.

3. Motivation (Stories That Stick)

Vision leaks; motivation decays. You have to keep the invite story alive. Every Sunday, highlight someone who came because of a friend. Baptism stories? Trace them back to the first invitation. What gets celebrated gets repeated, and nothing reinforces culture like stories told in public.

Budget for story capture…video, social posts, short stage moments. Hire a part-time storyteller before you buy another ad campaign.

If your strategy is “buy attention,” you’ll keep paying rent to platforms.

If your strategy is “build inviters,” you’ll own the asset … trust.

The most persuasive message your city will hear about your church won’t come from your page. It’ll come from your people.

Stop buying marketing. Start building inviters.