Does your church track member attendance?

[tedanderson]

has anyone else noticed attendance dropping significantly in the past year or so?

For us, attendance drops off during the late summer into the few weeks leading up to the fall. Everyone starts coming again once school starts. I also think that our congregation does a good job of witnessing and bringing in visitors because we have at least 15 to 20 first-time visitors on any given Sunday.

[Gracetech]

Our attendance is up 15% from last year which is wild when you where already at 3000. We keep growing and then starting plants and Video Venues to keep the campus parking under control. We have 17 campuses now in our association and 2 Video Venues.

Of course as always the attendance ebs and flows so you always see the drop in the summer and the school year return.

crt

[DTV-Engineer]

We've been growing fairly steadily -- right now, averaging roughly 1,200 total, between one Saturday evening and two Sunday morning services. We were around 1,000 a year ago, and about 500 or so four years ago. My sense is that with all of the uncertainty and trouble in our economy and society in general, people are hungry for the truth, stability, and hope that are rooted alone in Christ. Roughly half of the growth comes from people who have left other churches (not necessarily recently), and about half are new believers. This is not necessarily typical nowadays for Southern Baptist churches... but then, we're something of an anomaly up here in upstate New York!

There is some obvious variability in our attendance: we see a brief drop when we send teams off for ministry projects -- for instance, having fifty teens go somewhere for World Changers. Conversely, we get spikes when guests come for a conference like Freedom In Christ or a worship summit.

But losing three quarters of a congregation over five years seems like more than seasonal variability, and would normally correlate to one or more traceable causes: some internal, like leadership problems, splits, major doctrinal or procedural shifts; some external, like major employer relocation or the rhythms unique to being a church in a small town with a major transient population (military, college).

When I troubleshoot a piece of equipment that isn't working right, the first thing I usually ask is, What has changed? In an instance like Sue's, the same question could provide some real insight. Another thing that could be useful is to ask several friends, whose perception you trust, to visit with the goal of getting honest feedback from an outsider's eyes. Very often we become so accustomed to our facility and to our ways of doing things...

-- Jeff

[tedanderson]

My sense is that with all of the uncertainty and trouble in our economy and society in general, people are hungry for the truth, stability, and hope that are rooted alone in Christ.

Yeah.. I am thinking along the same lines. Not that being in church isn't important all of the time but I would still say that now is the best time to be in church.

Another thing that could be useful is to ask several friends, whose perception you trust, to visit with the goal of getting honest feedback from an outsider's eyes.

We have invoked the "secret shopper" method for tracking this and we are constantly improving how we are perceived by the public and we have quarterly church meetings where we discuss ways on improving how we greet people, how we interact with each other, and awareness of how we are currently doing in these areas.

losing three quarters of a congregation over five years seems like more than seasonal variability

I would have to agree. But in addition to the items listed above, I'd also consider what we were doing to bring more people into the church. Sometimes when people are led to leave a church, it only means that room is being created to bring in other people. There was time in my own congregation where there was "bad blood" amongst some of the people who held leadership positions. It turned out that as the new converts were getting trained up in the ministry, many of the departmental leaders were either stepping down from their positions or leaving the church completely.

So while every church has a specific purpose, IMHO witnessing and bringing people into the church should carry as much weight as retaining those who are already there.

[yeshua]

I think in general, it really depends on the size of the Church as to how attendance is calculated. We have about 50-80 people on Sunday Service and we all basically know each other by name so we keep record of families (but this is going to change to individuals soon...I'm looking at some Church Management Software for tracking attendance and $$ from offerings)...

For smaller Church's, names are pretty easy, but as soon as you start hitting 250+ or even 100+, this can start getting difficult. I've never been a part of a Church that had more then 100 people unless you count before I was 6 years old, so it is impossible for me to be accurate in how a larger Church would do their attendance...but thats how I would perceive it.

Now onto what exactly we do...and gonna start doing soon....

Currently:
One person has a list of families, this person looks during the service at how many people from each family is here then writes down that number beside their family name (sorted by the head of household).

Soon-to-be:
During the service, one or 2 people will look at who exactly is here, even if its a 2 year old and checks them off on the computer program as here.
Then during greet the family time (shake your hands and talk for an hour as it seems like sometimes) talk to the guests so that we can hopefully get some info from them for future contact.

I'm looking at the Membership Plus program right now entering data and such to determine if this program is what we want....but as soon as I'm done that then it should be an all go.