High Expectations: The Remarkable Secret for Keeping People in Your Church
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
For over a quarter of a century the problem of losing church members has progressively increased. Today the situation is so bad that less than one-third of the members in some churches attend worship services. Church leaders are crying for help.In an effort to help church leaders, the Billy Graham School of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary conducted a massive research project involving nearly 287 churches. The most revealing aspect of the study was that the higher expectations placed on members, the greater the likelihood that the members would stay and be involved with the church. Using the data gathered from this project, Thom Rainer presents the first-ever comprehensive study about 'closing the back door.' Rainer looks at why people are leaving the church and how church leaders can keep the members.
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Top Highlights
“We defined mission as ‘the primary purposes in which all Christian churches should be involved; these purposes typically include worship, evangelism, discipleship, ministry, and fellowship.’ We then defined the vision as something related to a specific church: ‘God’s specific plan for a specific church at a specific time.’” (source)
“Sunday School was rated the highest with an amazing average response of 4.91. But preaching was not too far behind with a response score of 4.40, and the great majority of the sermons preached are expository messages.” (source)
“Although expository preaching was rated the highest single factor in our earlier study on evangelistic churches, we were surprised to discover that it was strongly correlated to closing the back door.” (source)
“People are leaving our churches by the thousands each day, and others are quietly becoming less and less active.” (source)
“Two important elements, we were told, must be present for the worship service to be an assimilation factor.” (source)