In 8th grade, I thought I was unstoppable. A growth spurt gave me height, leverage, and what felt like destiny. I could clear high jump bars with a scissors kick while others struggled. No training, no technique, just raw advantage.

I beat everyone in my school, made it to my town’s track and field meet, and placed well. I was on top of the high jump world. (Albeit it was a very small world!)

In my freshman year of high school, I was toast. Everyone else had learned the Fosbury Flop…the backward roll that revolutionized high jumping. My height advantage evaporated. Suddenly, I couldn’t clear the same bars, and I didn’t even make the varsity team.

Lesson learned: Growth can make you lazy. It can trick you into thinking you’re great when you’re just tall.

Churches fall into the same trap. Growth feels like validation: more people, more buzz, more money. However, growth can be toxic if it masks underlying weaknesses. It’s a sugar high that makes leaders feel invincible when, in reality, they’re just riding momentum.

The hard truth: the very growth you’re celebrating may be setting you up for decline.

Let’s break it down. Five areas where unchecked growth quietly kills future growth:

If you don’t know who your guests are, they don’t exist. Churches celebrate attendance spikes but often fail at the most basic task: capturing guest info.

Here’s the brutal math: in many churches, only 3 out of 10 first-time guests fill out a connect card or text-in form. That means, 70% leave without a trace. Imagine running a restaurant that never records who dines there. That’s not strategy…it’s negligence. [ref]

Unchecked growth hides failure. When 100 people show up, you don’t feel the loss of the 70 who disappear. But fast-forward six months: you’ll plateau, scratching your head about why your “record Sundays” aren’t leading to real growth.

If your church is growing, you should see new visitors each week—roughly 2% of your average attendance. If your attendance is 1,000, that means week in and week out, you are averaging 20 guests that you could contact, follow up with, and invite to be a part of your community. If you don’t see this regularly, you are missing guests.

Without this new guest information, you are just gathering a crowd that you won’t be able to move towards deeper community and connection. Your growth will plateau and slide into decline. You will be left wondering where all the people went.

Catch their contact information. No contact information, no long-term growth.

Every pastor gets excited about first-time givers, but most of those givers will never give again. In the nonprofit world, donor retention hovers around 20%. This means, 8 out of 10 first-time donors vanish. [ref] For churches, the numbers aren’t much better.

Do you know your church’s donor retention rate? But even more pointedly, do you know the retention rate of new donors to your church? If the gap between these continues to grow, your church will run out of money, and your growth will stumble. Many churches have a core of faithful, long-term donors (that’s why the church around the corner from your place, with just a few people left, hasn’t died), but it takes more intentional effort to onboard new donors to fuel the future of the mission.

Growth masks this churn because new people continually replenish the bucket. But it’s a leaky bucket. Giving totals may rise, but the base is fragile. When momentum slows…or the economy dips…you’ll discover you’ve been funding ministry with one-night stands, not long-term partners.

Generosity follows gratitude. When people don’t feel valued, their support dries up fast.

In our world, speed is the new currency. Amazon ships in 24 hours and Uber arrives in five minutes. If your church waits a week to follow up with guests, you’ve already lost them.

Here’s the reality: follow up within 24 hours, and your chance of a second visit can be five times higher than if you wait a week. Five. Times. Higher. [ref]

Growth hides this problem because guests keep coming. But look at your second-visit rate: it’s probably abysmal. People don’t return because they never heard from you.

For years, I’ve said to campus pastors at new campuses to grab the “new here” cards before they are whisked away to a central team member to enter them into a database. Take pictures of each one. Then, on Sunday night, call each of those “new here” guests. Yes, Sunday evening.

Too many churches are too scared to show some passion in the follow-up process. I bet that my dentist has more urgency in ensuring that I book my next plaque removal than your church does in inviting guests to return. Let’s change that.

Slow follow-up is the silent killer of momentum. If you can’t respond fast, stop bragging about being “a friendly church.”

Healthy churches consistently see 20–30% of attendance made up of kids and students [ref]. That ratio isn’t just a nice-to-have; it’s the single strongest indicator of long-term health. Below 20%? You’re drawing adults but not reaching families. And without families, you don’t have a future.

You can celebrate growth today…more adults in seats, a buzzing lobby…but if kids aren’t in the mix, you’re quietly aging out. A church that trends older without bringing in the next generation is on a countdown clock.

Parents may love the preaching, music, and atmosphere, but if their kids aren’t excited to come back, the family will drift. Flip it around: when kids are thriving, families stick. Kids aren’t just a ministry; they’re your best retention strategy.

Ignore kids and you’re not just losing families—you’re scheduling your church’s funeral.

In small churches, staff do ministry. In large churches, staff equip people to engage in ministry. Fail to make that shift, and you’ll drown.

Here’s the metric: average churches run about 75 attendees per full-time staff. High-performing churches run 100:1 or more. If you’re at 40:1, you’re bloated. [ref]

Growth often hides inefficiency because staff are hustling to keep everything together. But payrolls balloon, volunteers disengage, and eventually the model collapses. You can’t hire your way to 10,000. You must mobilize.

This isn’t just organizational efficiency, it’s obedience. Ephesians 4 reminds us that pastors, teachers, and leaders exist “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” [ref] The goal isn’t to create a staff of superheroes who do everything; it’s to raise up a church full of ministers.

An insidiously dangerous pattern is when staff start absorbing work that used to be led by volunteers. That’s not progress…it’s regression. It appears that they are helping, but that behavior hinders the church’s development. The flow should run the other way: what staff carry today should eventually be released to volunteers tomorrow. If you see staff pulling ministry back from lay leaders, they’re not empowering the church…they’re shrinking it.

Staff who insist on doing everything aren’t heroes, they’re bottlenecks.

Staff who reach for another hire instead of mobilizing volunteers aren’t scaling ministry, they’re slowing it down.

Growth feels like success. But it’s often camouflage. Behind the buzz of full services and rising giving are the cracks: lost guests, shallow donor bases, families turned off, and staff stretched thin.

Unchecked growth is like a startup with booming revenue and no margin. It looks great on stage but collapses in real life.

The good news: every one of these issues is fixable. But only if leaders stop drinking their own Kool-Aid and start confronting the uncomfortable data.

Your action plan:

Because this isn’t about numbers, it’s about people. Each metric represents individuals who either connected or didn’t, gave again or didn’t, felt welcomed or ignored. These aren’t “corporate KPIs,” they’re kingdom outcomes.

Growth is a gift. But it’s also a test. The question isn’t, “Are you growing?” It’s, “Are you stewarding growth in a way that sustains?”

Don’t let your church’s growth kill its future growth. Build the systems. Strengthen the foundation. Make the shift from tall middle schooler to varsity athlete. Learn the Flop.