Growing Churches attract New Members. How you bring those New Members on board has a lot to say about the Church. You want them to come and grow spiritually. But how do you do that effectively?

You need to challenge new comers not only to join the Church but to also want to Grow Spiritually. There are many paths that this can take:

• Bible Study, both individually and in group settings
• Service to others, both in the neighborhood and across town
• Missions, both local and global

If you bring New Members on board and help them to grow, then the Church will be strong and well. While not every Church has opportunity to grow, every Church does have the opportunity to help its members grow spiritually. By focusing on that service, you help build up the Church.

How much time and effort do you spend assimilating new members? Some people need a lot of help getting involved with the Church, for they have little history. Others are ready on day 1 to teach a Church School class. How do you tell the difference?

First, you need staff that are committed to helping new members find their place to worship and serve. This can be a part time responsibility for a staff person. In lots of Churches, one of the pastors serves this role – because they have direct contact through the membership process. If you are blessed with a full time staff person, then they are probably overwhelmed. People join the Church at various times throughout the year. There probably isn’t a pattern (though it never hurts to search for one.) The point is that your full time staff person will need resources and possibly others to help this process go smoothly.

Second, you need to identify what new members need. Do they just need information about areas to serve? Everyone finds out about worship through regular channels (e.g. your website.) But most Churches don’t have a ready list for areas to serve. Someone just knows about it and needs the help. The staff person needs to be a broker to help connect the new member who wants to serve with the lay volunteer looking for help. And some new members need encouragement to take the first step in this process.

Third, you need to find a way to identify new members that didn’t get involved – i.e. grew stale. From them, you want to at least identify why they didn’t get more involved; but don’t call them up and challenge them! Perhaps they never found the right opportunity. Or perhaps they are just shy. Or perhaps they got turned off from their first attempt at service. If you can gather some information in this area, then it will help you do a better job with the next new member that comes along.

Assimilation is vital to growing congregations. When everyone has found their place to worship and serve, then they feel more satisfied with their Church. They may not volunteer for everything, but they can be involved somewhere. Stick with it, and offer them the resources that they need.

Lots of Churches take “Welcome Packets” to new members after they join. Some will event take pictures and put them up on the Church bulletin board. What about having an “easter egg” for new members on the Church web site. This would be a special one time link that you would email to the new member. They could execute the link and get a brief page of links that matched their interest and talents, as documented on their new member card. If they had an interest in children, then you could include the link to the Children’s Ministry page and the email address of the Children’s minister. If they had an interest in the Church Library, then you could include a link to the Online Catalog and the email address of the head of the Library committee. All of this would be information that they could find online – if they knew where to look on the web site. The Easter Egg just puts in in one place so they can find it quicker. The special link could then expire in 2 weeks after they had gotten used to things and made contacts in their phone. It is a way to help assimilate them faster into the life of the Church.

Having someone on staff in charge of the assimilation of new members is not enough. Although they may work hard to develop an effective process, and they may bring together the resources needed for that process, some people will only go so far with it. The new member may have ideas of their own as to how much they want to get involved with the new Church. We tend to presume that they want to go 100%, but in reality they have a certain “comfort zone” in mind. How do you discover this degree of assimilation that represents their comfort zone? Well, why not ask them? You can use an online survey for new members to gauge how far they have gone down the path of assimilation. On that basis, you could offer them an opportunity to get involved with a specific ministry in a different way, one that was not listed on the annual ministry opportunities brochure. This opens the door for them to move to the other side of their comfort zone, which is probably the most that can be expected. After all, people have work commitments, family commitments, and commitments to friends and social groups. You want them to be effective in their own style of ministry, be that meals on wheels or an ad hoc outreach to one person who needs them as a friend. Be flexible, and look for ways to involve people the most in things they’ll enjoy doing. The Church as a volunteer community will then really take off!

Why not have a New Members page on your web site, complete with video clips? The idea would be to let each new member record a video clip right after they joined. The topic would be their personal testimony of faith. This is appropriate as a witness to their faith. In most Churches, joining requires that you either profess your faith or reaffirm the vows of membership. The video clip would capture a word of testimony from each person that the community of faith would then be able to see outside of the Sunday morning event. Families could share together or separately. Each clip would be limited to 3 minutes.

The assimilation of new members is an ongoing challenge in many Churches. This idea would give that process a jumpstart. Staff could review the video as it went up on the web site to tailor the assimilation plan for each new member. Other members of the Church could watch the new member’s video and identify like interests. The video clip would make each new member more visible, and open opportunities to get involved with various small groups based on shared life experiences. This would open the door to new members, who might otherwise stay put in the pew. Video clips would stay up for about a month, and then rotate out as others joined.