The Church Answers Podcast
Church Members Who Do This One Thing Will Be Your Most Committed Members
Welcome to the Church Answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. Now get ready for fast-paced insights on key issues affecting the local church today. We release three episodes each week, so make sure you've seen or heard them all. And now, here is the CEO of Church Answers, Tom Rayner. Welcome to the Church Answers podcast. My name is Tom Rayner. I'm joined by Jess Rayner recovering from knee surgery. We'll soon be walking, he hopes. This particular podcast will be released on September 19th. So those who are watching are listening to this, I hope you're walking by then. I will be. I will be. I'll be back. My physical therapist has already told me that, so I believe it. Okay. What's your physician say? Same thing? What do you think? I'm good to go. At this point, as people are listening to this, I'm walking around crunch-free, so y'all can rejoice with me. Hey, I want to, as always, thank Chaney and Associates, our sponsor, but I want to hear about what's going on with your world before I get a little bit more. What's going on with the publishing world, particularly craft book publishing? Yeah, yeah. It's been cool to see recently. There's been a strong desire for more and more of people self-publishing their books. I have the privilege of working with lots of different pastors. I'm actually seeing more pastors and more churches begin to use publishing for discipleship. They're actually creating their own discipleship resources that are specific to their church. It's been a neat trend that I'm kind of curious to see if it continues to go. If you're a church leader out there, you never really thought about creating your own resource. The self-publishing world has made it a lot more advantageous and a lot more available with that. Yeah, that's been my recent journey with that. Thanks for asking. Well, I want to say something else about that. It's not just the publishing world, but you provide hands-on for these authors and for the church churches. Right. So you used to call it guided publishing. You don't need any more, but what did you mean by that? Yeah, guided self-publishing. What I do is I help take content that's written and turn it into a fully published book or workbook. I'm actually working with churches that are doing more workbooks. I'm just finished with one church that did a baptism workbook for their church, for their kids. So they created their own resource. The pastor wrote it and took the content, created it into workbook, and now they distribute it out to all their children and parents who are thinking about going through baptism. So it's pretty cool to see local churches begin to create their own resources. And I get to help them take the content and move it straight to publishing format. I love it. I love it. I did want to share what's going on there. You can see all about craft, published, craftbook publishing, craftbookpublishing.com. So it's c-r-a-f-t, bookpublishing.com. You can see in the show notes as well. We also want to thank Chaney and Associates, craftbook publishing. It's not our sponsor, but I didn't want to mention it. Chaney and Associates, the accounting firm for the church, is our sponsor. And they are also the one who provided the lead sponsorship, the sponsorship, for our new inaugural church research, a church answer to research. And it's basically asking, what are the attitudinal differences about church between the un-church and those who attend church? Fascinating. So just to give you a little hint, the un-church, often like church better than those who attend church. There are a lot of different parts to that, but I can tell you a little bit more of it. You can read the research. It's out, it's free, and thank you, Chaney and Associates, for providing that resource to the world. Okay, Jess, we're going to continue to look at some of the Ryan Burge data. When I say continue, we looked at it in a previous podcast that we provided this week. And last time we were looking at attendance patterns and do conservatives really attend more frequently? The answer is yes, the Dean Kelly thesis of 1970 is still true in 2024, yes they do. And now we're going to just point out something. There's one thing that your church member will do that will demonstrate that he or she is one of your most committed church members, and it's almost circular reasoning. They are the ones who attend at least once a week. If they attend twice a week, 90% chance they'll stay very active, once a week, 80% chance. Now the reason I say that is, well, isn't that, you know, the chicken and the egg type thing or circular reasoning, whatever you want to say? If they attend more, they're committed, if they're committed, they attend more. Here's my thesis, Jess, and I'll have you come in and on. I think church leaders, I'm talking about pastor, staff, and lay leaders, I think church leaders are minimizing attendance as a discipline as opposed to just saying it's something that you should do instead of it's something that God wants us to do based upon the writer of Hebrews and based upon the pattern of the whole New Testament from Acts 2 to Revelation 3, we are to be integrally involved in the local church. So the reason I said that is, I think there are some pastors out there that don't have much conviction about the frequency of attendance and therefore they don't see it as a spiritual discipline. And I do. Now you can challenge me if you want to, but I want to hear you. Yeah, I've never actually heard church students as a spiritual discipline. I do hear worship as a spiritual discipline and worship I believe obviously you can be doing it in an individual way, but I think we're, you know, scripturally we see it that you are to worship together. And so I see worship, so that church attendance, I guess we could, you know, debate the wording of it, but that would be my indication of a discipline is worship. I think though, you know, the common fear of why pastors, and I've had this before, is when you push it, when you make it a high expectation, you should write, write a book on that by the way, by the way, high expectation, the fear is that it's actually going to push people away. And so the idea is like, well, if I say, you got to do this, do this and this, they're not going to commit at all. And so I'm going to lower the bar as low as possible and at least they can do this, then maybe they'll stay. Yeah. Well, that's wrong. Just plain and simple. I said it was a fear. I didn't say it was what you're supposed to do. I said it was a fear. Expectations rightly stated increase the results of the church members in their faithfulness. Now what you're talking about really is expectations wrongly stated, which turns into legalistic dictates. Sure. You don't want to do that. But if we can start recovering the value of the local church, scripturally, I mean, it begins in Acts two and everything all the way to Revelation three to the seven churches is all about the local church. It's God's plan A for his mission on earth and he didn't have a plan B. If we can start communicating that, it's kind of like, you know, what are the two institutions of the Bible, family and church? Who are the two primary persons that God speaks about in the family? Certainly children, but he still talks about the husband and the wife. It would be like you telling Rachel at the altar as you are giving your vows. And I think I was the pastor who was mispronouncing some words during that time, but I'm giving you the, I'm giving the vows for you to recite. And then you have a timeout and you say, no, Rachel, I just want to have a timeout for just a moment. I love you and I want to marry you, but I'm going to tell you, I'm not going to be around a lot. I'll make be with you around half the time, but I'm going to be going to other places. I'll see you once a month, something like that. I think that Rachel would have become a runaway bride at that moment. Rightfully so. And it's because you are not expressing commitment to her. Well, who is the bride of price? Yes, the universal church, but manifest as the local church. And I think we've done down what it means to be a part of the local church. And so we're not committed. Okay. So, you know, then the question that follows is, well, what does that look like? How do you do that? You know, our church, that is a part of our membership. We lay those expectations out, those commitments out that you attend whenever you're physically able. You know, that's the phrase we use. You're sick, you're out of town, you know, you can't, you know, you have some homebound attend if you're physically able, that's the commitment level. Now, now the other question I have for you is if I'm listening to this, I'm going, all right. But once a month, obviously that's, you know, you're going to point to the Sunday morning service. But, you know, sometimes you are in vacation, you do a weekend, you know, get away. How do you, how do you create other opportunities for someone to attend beyond the Sunday morning? Because if you can, if you can get to that level where they're committing and attending more than once a week, sounds like you're going to, as a pastor, you're going to see a lot more committed people attending church. Yeah. One thing that will make person more committed is to be more committed. Yeah. I mean, that's the circular reasoning. And you know, what do you do? You know, you could, you could give the answer that many would expect, oh, what's the digital service? But that's not what I would say. I'd say be involved in a group, be involved in ministry, be a faithful giver. Those things are going to affect the overall commitment of that person beyond just the Sunday morning. And you know me, Jess, I hate missing Sunday morning, you're my pastor. And I occasionally do, but I tell you why, I tell you what I'm doing. And it is rare for me to miss Sunday, not because I feel like it's legalistic, it's just because I love our church and I love Christ's church. I want to be there. I see, I have found even in my church, it's not even necessarily an event or something the church puts on. I found the people that just come in the building throughout the week are the ones are going to be way more intended. Again, you can say it's circular reasoning on this. But those people who stopped in for whatever reason, even if it's not a scheduled church thing, those are my most committed people as well. We have a homeschool group that meets one day a week and we have several families from the homeschool group that attend our church that all of them do. But those families that are in the building on Tuesdays, they're in my super committed crowd as well. So when you look at it, just getting people, even in the building, if you have a facility, obviously I know some church planes out there don't have that. I'm just talking about those who do have a facility, getting them in, serving community groups, small groups, prayer, just creating opportunities for people to hang out. We do church family lunches. All those increase the opportunity to have a greater commitment level because as they are developing relationships, as they feel like this is home and that's what we talk about. This is church family, this is home. People really start gravitating towards that and they take ownership of it and that increases the commitment level as well. Well the thesis, no, it isn't a thesis, the statistical research that Ryan Burge did while were people attending church more or less in 2022 versus 2020 at graphsaboutreligion.com. What he showed was is in 2020, as they're coming out of the pandemic, if they're attending twice a week, they're 90% likely to stay active. If they're attending once a week, they're 80% likely to stay as active. Anything under once a week and their attendance pattern is going to deteriorate significantly. So a three time a month, a tender will eventually become a twice a month and then a once a month. The pattern is always negative in his research unless you're already at that committed level. Which begs the question, if they're not at that committed level, how do you get them there? That's a story for another podcast. Thanks for listening to the church answers podcast, the one factor, the committed are committed. That's circular reasoning, but if once you get them there, they are likely to stay committed. Thank you, Chaney and Associates, thank you, Jess. And as always, thank you listeners and viewers for being a part of the church answers podcast. You have been listening to the church answers podcast presented by Chaney and Associates. Chaney and Associates are the accounting firm for the church. We need to focus on ministry. Chaney will focus on finances. Also please subscribe and give a review to the church answers podcast on YouTube and on your favorite podcasting app. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)