Make 2012 Your Best Year Yet

Next, I encouraged him to put a greater emphasis on visitor follow-up visits. My friends, getting your visitors back is just as important as getting them there in the first place. 100% of your new converts come from your guests and 95% of your guests will attend five or more times before being baptized. Rest assured, visitor follow-up is the most successful way to get them back. Your visitors ARE your future members.

By Tim Massengale

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Elder Vernon Baker smiled as he gazed across the assembled group of pastors, ministers, and lay leaders.

“I want to welcome you to our sixth annual Revival Harvest conference. We have hosted this meeting in the hope of encouraging pastors and church leaders to apply solid principles of evangelism so they might effectively reach their communities with this wonderful truth. We have a fantastic group of clinicians that will be teaching on a variety of topics over the next two days. Then each evening we will have dynamic preaching that will most certainly put the icing on the cake.

However, before we introduce our speakers, I want to take a few minutes and share with you a conversation that I had with a pastor several months ago.   He was concerned because he was not seeing the kind of growth for which he had been hoping. He had set his growth goal to double in attendance in five years or less and he was starting to fall behind on his progress plan. So he called me on the phone and after we talked for a bit I invited him to come down to spend an afternoon with me. We spend almost four hours discussing his situation and arrived at a plan of action for the coming year. I have his permission to share this plan with you this morning. Later, during our last day session, we are planning to have a round table discussion with a panel of our speakers and this will give you a chance to ask questions concerning what I’m about to share. There are ten points that I encouraged him to focus upon in the coming year:

 

                First, I encouraged him to place a greater emphasis on attracting new visitors to his church services and events. You see, 100% of your new converts come from your guests. So if you can increase your door traffic, you will increase your growth. Once an individual attends your church you have a natural connection to reach out to them over and over again. However, if they have never visited your services they are in the ‘cold-calls’ category and the chance of seeing them saved is greatly diminished. But research has shown that a church with an effective follow-up system can see fifteen to twenty percent of their guests eventually become converts. So if you have set a goal for twenty adults to receive the Holy Ghost this coming year, you will need about 100 adults to visit your church.

How can you increase your visitor flow? There are many, but let me share with you a few that have been successful in my church. (1) A number of years ago we launched our Constant Contact Consciousness (CCC) ministry. I have found CCC to be one of the more successful methods of encouraging members to be faithful in personal evangelism. I’ll explain more about this in a minute. (2) Next, we plan a number of special services of various kinds throughout the year. Our goal is to give our saints plenty of reasons to invite family, friends, and co-workers to church. It’s important that you plan these events well, promote them aggressively, inform and invite all past guests, pray much, and of course, follow-up faithfully. (3) We still have good success with Saturday Door Knocking. We use this once a month event to promote special events, boost bus/van ministry, get home Bible studies via the Quest Survey, find riders for our car ministry, and more. You see, we are not just inviting people to church.

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