church attendance

Every quarter, The Unstuck Group compiles all the data collected using our Vital Signs Assessment tool to monitor trends in churches in the United States and around the world and releases it in a quarterly Unstuck Church Report. Churches recently completed the assessment to help us get a picture of where there is health and where churches appear to be getting stuck. We share 3 important findings here.

You may not realize it, but your church management software (ChMS) plays a significant role in retaining (and reclaiming) church members. How you manage ministry matters whether you’re engaging people to continue worshiping at your church or encouraging disengaged members to return. Why? Because church management solutions keep information and processes organized—and churchgoers notice when things aren’t running smoothly!

As a church leader, you know that each person in your worship services or small groups is valuable. You hope that each person will want to grow spiritually as a part of your church family. But you realize that people come and go. Every church will have losses. People move away or graduate to heaven. And it’s inevitable that some folks will leave the church despite its best efforts to help them belong. Sometimes God wants to replant them somewhere else. Sometimes it’s a matter of “fit.”

Despite the wide reports of 40% of people going to church, the actual percentage of regular church attendance is a little less than 18%. Yet, it's very common for pastors to see unfamiliar faces on Sunday morning. New people do come to churches, but they don't seem to come back. While some of them were never going to become regular attendees, some might have returned if they had a good first experience. One way to help stem the tide of lost opportunities is with church connection cards.

Increasing attendance is a top priority for most churches. Bringing more people through the doors of the church can translate to impacting more people for Christ.  Church is where communities of worshippers can deepen their faith and connect with other believers. Worshipping together is vital to the Christian life, yet many churches struggle to fill the pews.

There is a growing trend of church mergers happening across the country. Nearly forty percent of the multisite churches in America today derive at...

With the landscape of church changing dramatically in America, church models are shifting to better support today's church-goer. In an increasingly secularized nation with...

We have no shortage of information. We are surrounded by data, but data alone doesn’t tell a story. An individual star in the sky...