Visiting church might be a routine activity for you and you might have seen many church members ask you to visit it regularly. If you compare then you would see the total numbers of visitors have dropped significantly in the current year. There could be many reasons for that such as competing obligations and logistical obstacles. Every church such as Planetshakers Melbourne church tries to implement new ways to increase its visitors. They always aim to turn one-timer into an everyday visitor. If you are a church leader then you would have noticed the decrease in the visitors. According to the survey done in the year 2018, there are only 22% of the people go to the church regularly. Out of 100%, 28% claim that they never go to the church.
Being a pastor, you might have thought about many ways of increasing the visitors in the church such as children ministries, inspiring sermon series, and volunteer opportunities. But not every activity would guarantee you the results. Hence in the first place, you would need to understand why do people want to visit the church. According to the recent survey done with the Americans, it was observed that the core reason to visit the church is to feel close to god while some of them gave other reasons such as to become a good person, to find comfort in hard times, and to provide the moral foundation to the children. If you understand these basic things then it would be easy for you to think about the perfect ways to increase the number of visitors to the church. Here is the guide for your help which will tell you about few ways to increase the number of visitors to your church.
Focus on creating the welcoming environment
Why do people love to visit the church? Because they feel the warmth at this place. No matter how difficult their life is, once they come here, they find great peace of mind. This warm environment would enforce them to keep coming back every day. Hence being a church leader, your first focus should be on creating a warm and welcoming environment for your visitors. How you can do that? Start thinking about the surrounding of a church from a visitor’s perspective. Ask yourself, would you like to come here every day or how would you like to be welcomed or greeted once you enter the church. Here you can also take help from the regular visitor and ask them about the feedback as well as the scope of improvement.
Keep engaging with the current visitors
As we discussed in the first point it is important to get feedback from the active visitors to improve the presence and environment of the church. Hence you can make a habit of engaging with the current visitors regularly. This will not only help them keep coming back to the church every day but they can also bring their other family members or friends along with them.
Build up your presence on social media
Since nowadays everyone is active on social media it has become the easiest way to spread the news to people about anything easily. You can grab this opportunity and start building the social media presence of your church. You can ask more people to join your online community and spread the word about your activities which would encourage them to visit the church regularly. You can even consider getting the website designed for your church where people can find more information about it.
Be Volunteer
Many churches participate in various social causes and activities which helps them to get recognition. You can start participating in various social work activities such as cleaning up the park or donating books to the school etc. along with your community. Here you can also make sure to keep the brochure or the pamphlet of the information related to your church. You can get it distributed at the place where you finish the activity.
Work on the sermons time
Most of the churches have a sermons time of more than an hour. In today’s busy life people find it a bit difficult to devote this time to visit the church. Hence you can try to reduce the sermons time from 30 to 45 minutes where people can easily adjust their schedule and visit the church regularly.
