Early on in the development of Elevation Church, before we launched Sunday mornings, we came into a few principles that were instrumental in our growth and retention. They were the by-product of intensely passionate people focusing their collective energies on a singular task. That task was aggressively meeting and following up with First Time Guests (FTG’s), it was guest services on crack.

When people hear that as a church we have grown from 121 our first Sunday to almost 2,000 in just 17 months they think, “that must be great to have grown so fast” or “you guys have it so easy”. What people don’t realize is that we grew from 16 to 60 in the 12 months leading up to our launch, blazing growth isn’t it. It was just plain hard work! We moved to a large city where a new church started every 12 days last year and not one of the original 8 families that sold their homes and moved to Charlotte were from here. We recognized the obstacles but didn’t allow them to slow us down. We maximized every opportunity that walked in our doors.

This is the first of a three part blog where I’ll talk about the various principles of assimilation we utilized based upon stages in our development. This first one will focus on how we built our pre-launch team. The teams who parked the cars, changed the diapers and moved speakers when we launched Sunday mornings.

The first step is crucial and starts before you begin seeking people to join the team. That first step is about establishing a culture. Before you start adding to your launch team, what’s the attitude you want those people to carry? Who are you looking for and what does it mean to be a part of your church? When we launched Sunday mornings we had 60 people on our first volunteer roster. Over the past 17 months we have lost only 3 of the original 60 volunteers. That’s a 5% attrition rate and we think that’s incredible. To me that’s just as remarkable as the growth we have had and I believe the two are related. The reason for such low attrition is because of the culture we established. Every volunteer understands that what they do is just as important as the sermon. They know that they play a vital role in people coming to faith in Christ.

Second step, know who is coming. In the 6 months leading up to our first public worship experience I kept attendance every week. It was totally quiet and no one knew I was doing it, but I knew who was at every one of those meetings. When a FTG walked into our location, they we assaulted with love and escorted to our room by 10 or more greeters sometimes. We only had 16 people on board at that time so everyone was a greeter. My role with a new person was to figure out as much as I could about them. I called it the name, game and story. Who are they, what do they do and anything about their story that I or someone else ion the team could pry out of them. Everyone on the team understood they needed to connect with FTG’s and went out of their way to establish relationships. Each FTG would be given a simple communication card to complete which gave us their contact information. At the end of the night I would go through the communication cards and along with my notes develop a detailed attendance report.

Third step, follow-up with your FTG’s. The goal of follow-up wasn’t to say “thank you for coming”, we did that, the goal was to set-up a face to face meeting. With the attendance report in-hand I would begin Monday morning and call every FTG. Since the goal was a coffee, lunch, etc… I needed to find the best person for the face to face. Sometimes it was me and other times it was a member of our team. For instance, when a new couple visited that had just moved here from Pittsburgh I connected them with Tyler and Amy because they are fellow Pennsylvanians. Or if a guy was a CS Lewis fan came I connected them with John and Heather. A valuable principle you have to understand is that FTG’s will come back if they resonate with the vision but will stick around when they connect with the people. You have to have both, vision and connections, without one they either won’t come back or stick around.

Lastly, who’s driving the process? Someone has to be intentionally following up with and connecting people. That’s what assimilation is all about, taking a FTG’s and turning them into a vital part of the body. Someone has to be connecting those people, developing relationships and communicating vision with those FTG’s who have questions.

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