Practical Church Newsletter ⛪️

TOGETHER WITH

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As we all know, tracking Sunday attendance is helpful and necessary, but not a good measure of engagement. A good number of people don’t come every Sunday, and you can’t tell from your attendance tracking how often someone might attend.

While you should continue to track attendance, below are 4 metrics you can also track that better reflect people’s engagement in your church.

Group Attendance

This can be tracked via a Google Sheet (or equivalent) or through many church management software’s (we use Groups in Planning Center currently, and Google Sheets previously). Create an attendance tracking for each group and you’ll be able to see not only how many people are active in your groups, but also how engage each person is.

Note: you’ll have to remind your leaders weekly to update their attendance, or this metric will quickly become unhelpful/unreliable.

Giving Units

How many unique financial givers do you have per month? Note that a family of 4 would only count as one “giving unit.” Because a giving unit can include more than one person, this doesn’t necessarily tell you how many people are giving, but it is a good thing to track month to month to see if the number of people giving is going up, down, or staying the same.

Connect cards received

We track connect cards with our Sunday attendance. This way we can see every Sunday, and every month, how many connect cards we received. Does moving the connect table help or hurt that number? Does how we communicate our connect card from stage need to be changed? You can only know if you track how many you get each Sunday.

Number of people who served each month

How many people showed up to serve at least one time that month? Is that number going up or down? Here you can also individually see how people are doing. It is not enough to know how many serve positions you filled that month, as having a few people fill every position every week is not as good (or healthy) as having multiple different people step in and serve

Last week on the Practical Church podcast I shared 6 ways to sustain yourself in ministry. Not yet subscribed? Do so below so you can get the episodes sent right to you.

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More Resources to help you in ministry 🙌

Here are more ways you can get the help you need:

1. Join the Practical Church Facebook group. Connect with 2,300+ pastors and ministry leaders to get help and feedback from others.

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3. Click here to submit a ministry question to be answered on a future Practical Church Podcast episode.

P.S. Who was the greatest financier in the Bible?

Noah. He was floating his stock while everyone else was in liquidation.

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