The process of connecting people to the life of the church is simple. The key is to deny your preference on what you think you should do and how you should be doing it, and focus on what makes connection easy for people.
In the past few years, we have moved from a four-week class designed to get people connected, to a two week class to a two hour session with lunch included. We found our connection ratio of less than 50% remained the same. We had a barrier and needed to identify it.
Our desire has always been to inspire people to action and become thriving partners with Champions Centre. The barrier we identified was us. We began to ask the question: “What do people really need to know before they get connected?” If they didn’t need to know it, we cut it.
With most of our content on the chopping block, we began to reconstruct our approach. If our goal is to get people into relationship with others by way of serving on a team why not design a session that is a Starting Point for everyone that is based on the heart of why we do what we do and the significant part that they play?
That’s exactly what we did. Our new Starting Point Session is 90 minutes, in between services, every other weekend. It is designed to captivate the heart of people, getting them connected and serving on a team right away. What we have found is about 95% of the people who attend Starting Point get connected to others and the life of the church.
Lessons learned through this process:
- Connecting people is about creating a heart felt conversation that links their life to the life of the church.
- Deny your preference. Simply means that we will always defer to what is easy for people, not ourselves.
- Continually strive to eliminate barriers for people, making it easy for them to get connected.
Deny your preference. Create an environment that causes people to get involved. It will be more challenging for you, but much easier for people. When we connect people to the life of the church, we see relationships formed, lives changed, and we see the kingdom of God in action in o.
