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Your church's growth is killing your church's growth. Hey, what do I mean by that? It's Rich Burch here from the Unseminary Podcast, a solo episode today. This comes out of some conversations I've been having with people all across the country. We've been seeing swelling attendance in a number of places. But what does that really mean for your church? If I could sit across the table from you, I would start with a story about when I was in eighth grade. Well, when I was in eighth grade, I competed in the high jump. Do you remember that? The high jump. I could easily clear the highest thing that they would put in front of me, the highest bar. I would do a scissor kick jump over it, no problem at all. In fact, I won. You know, everybody in my school, my junior high, I won, got beat everybody there, and then ended up in my city's competition. It actually did quite well. You know, didn't get beyond the city, but did quite well. And I never practiced. It was just my height and the fact that I was tall. I had had a really early growth spurt. In fact, if you were to come and see me, if we were to see each other in shorts someday, you'd notice I still have stretch marks on my knees because of the growth spurt that I went through back then. Okay, so why am I talking about that? What does that have to do with your church? Well, this is the thing. And when I hit my next year, freshman year of high school, I went from being top of the class to being bottom of the heap in high jump. And why was that? Everybody else learned the Fosbury Flip. What is that? That's really standard, what you see in high jump now. Everybody does this. It was invented in the 60s. This guy did this kind of flop over, and people cleared heights that I just could not with my scissor kick. I never changed. I never adapted. I stayed the same and, in fact, didn't even make it out of my gym class. I was so bad at high jump. What does that have to do? Well, this is the thing. Growth can make you lazy. I realized that because I was tall and could scissor kick over it. I didn't need to learn how to improve. Churches fall into the same trap. Growth can feel like validation. More people, more buzz, frankly, more money. However, growth is toxic, or can be toxic if it masks underlying weaknesses. It's like a sugar high with no protein in your meal. And so I want to talk to you about five statistics today. Five measurable things that you should be looking under your hood because I've seen this in growing churches. If you don't pay attention to this man, your growth could be killing your church's growth. Number one, first time guest capture rate. Growth without numbers is just decline in disguise. So what do I mean by this? If you have lots of people attending your church, lots of swelled audiences, you've got lots of people attending, but you're not capturing the right guest names. If you're not capturing the names of those people that are coming at your church, you, you're just seeing swelled attendance and you will not be able to follow up with these people and get them connected long term. In fact, it's been said that 3 out of 10 first time guests at a church, 70% will not provide their contact information willy nilly to a church. You've got to incentivize to them. There's a benchmark that we work with in our coaching with churches and what you should be seeing is, and this is the number, this is the first number we're going to look at here, you should be seeing 2%, 2% average documented first time guests. So if you're a church of a thousand people, that means every single week, week in, week out, you should be seeing 21st time guests. You should have their contact information. If your growing church is not seeing at least 2%, you're not capturing enough, it's not clear enough why people would give you their contact information. You don't have a clear next step for them. You don't have a clear dedicated team for first time guests. You are frankly underperforming. And if you don't tighten that up over time, you will not be able to sustain the growth that you're currently experiencing without gathering new guest contact information. You're just gathering a crowd, you're not building a community. So you should audit your capture rate for the last three months. Where's that actually been at? How close are you to this 2% documented average weekly number? You need to create as frictionless ways for people to respond as possible. Make it easy, don't make them guess. You cannot make this too clear. You need to be using an ethical bribe. A water bottle, a coffee mug, some swag in exchange for their contact information. Hey, your presence with us today has been a gift. We want to give you a gift. Drop by the new Here kiosk in the lobby and we would love to give you insert this ethical bribe and then finally assign accountability. Who's actually responsible for it. This number is a critical number and it needs to show up on one of your teammates dashboards they should be thinking about consistently. So that's number one. Number two, new donor retention gap, the revolving door of giving. Now this one might take you a little bit of math. I know you got into ministry, did you think there would be math involved? I didn't. This might take a little bit of math, but what I want you to do is to look into the retention rate, your overall retention rate of your donors. Let's say that you're retaining 70% of your donors year over year. So every hundred donors that you receive that give to you, 70% give the next year, that would be actually very good. That would be good number, solid number for that. Now what I want you to look at is the retention rate of the donors in your last full calendar year that were brand new to the church. So here we are in 2025. I would look back and say all the donors that gave for the first time in 2024, how many of those have given this year in 2025? And what you will see is there will be a gap between your long term donors and your new donor retention rate. So why is this a problem? Well, let me explain this in if you do not close the gap between long term donors versus short term new donors, what will happen is you over time your retention rate will be pulled down by your new donors. You need to be more aggressive on following up those first time donors and inviting them to become a second and third time donor. See what happens is as your church grows, you become less efficient at this. And this is frankly how churches run out of money because you're not integrating new donors as fast as you have with the rest of your donor. Community growth masks this sort of churn. Your overall revenue can be going up with new short term donors, but if you're not retaining them, you won't sustain that. Long term growth can mask this because new people are constantly filling that bucket. But your bucket has got a hole in it. Giving totals rise, but the base is fragile. When momentum slows or the economy slips or something goes wrong, you'll discover that you've been funding your church on a ministry with a series of one night stands. People who give once but don't come back time and time again. Not long term partners. So what I want you to do is I want you to track your first time donor rate to second time donor rate. What is it? How long does it take for them to go from one gift to many? If 100 people give for the first time this year, how many of them Give again in 90 days? Build a 48 hour thank you system. We know that there's all kinds of studies that show that the faster you follow up with donors and thank them, the more likely they are to give a second and third gift. So no generic receipts. I want you to write personal thank you notes, handwritten phone calls, that sort of thing. This needs to be a high priority. You need to report impact consistently with your donors. Don't just say thank you. Show them how their giving is making a difference in the ministry of the church. When you give, good things happen. Do that on Sunday mornings through regular reporting back to your donors. Move people to recurring giving. If people have given in the last 90 days and they have not set up recurring giving, ask them directly to set up recurring giving. Listen, I want you to treat new donors in your church like little seedlings. They're like, I'm growing this new grass in the front of my house this time of year. Our grass got scorched this summer, it was so hot. But we're fixing new grass and I've got to, I've had to care for that grass. I've had to water it. I've had to spend a lot of time. That is the same thing you should be doing with new donors. Early care determines long term fruit. All right, number three, follow up speed. Speed to first touch. Delay means decay. So what do I mean by this? In our world, speed is the new currency. You know this. You give business to organizations that frankly just move faster than other businesses. Amazon has told us this, man. They ship within 24 hours and they've taught us this. They're shaping our culture. When I click a button, the distance between when I click that and when I shows up, it just keeps getting shorter and shorter and shorter. It was five days, then two days, then one day, then same day, then within hours. And our churches, if we delay, delay and don't have intensity with following up with first time guests. So we've collected that contact information. If we have not followed up quickly, we will lose those first time connections. I've said it for years for campus pastors as we're launching a new location, I'll say, listen, I know your church has some sort of follow up system, but what I want you to do is to grab those cards or to get that contact information on Sunday and then after dinner, Sunday night before bedtime, get on the phone and call every one of your first time guests. We say that to new campus pastors because we need that. We Want to see those guests return time and time again in a new location. If you're experiencing a swell in attendance at your church, we need that kind of intensity with your new here guests to see those people coming back time and time again. Too many churches are too scared to show some intensity and passion in their follow up process. I like to call this the principle of 7 11. What do I mean by 7 11? It's seven contacts in the first 11 days. I know that sounds crazy, but that is the kind of follow up that is working and prevailing at churches all across the country. I bet your dentist is better at following up with you to get you to show up to the church than your church is in following up with first time guests. And all they're trying to do is to clean my teeth, put some fluoride in. We've got an eternal message that we're trying to literally turn back the tide of our culture and see people encounter Jesus. We need the kind of intensity where we follow up quickly and often in particularly in those first couple weeks after a first time guest arrives. So build a system. It's a handwritten note by your new here kiosk team on Sunday. It's a Sunday afternoon phone call or text from a campus pastor. It's a Monday email from the church. It's a Tuesday phone call from a volunteer whose job is to help people get connected. You've got to share the load. This can't all be staff. We've got to take some intensity on this follow up. Speed to first touch is a critical thing. You may have a lot of guests, but if we're not following up with them, they will not stick and stay long term. Number four, kids and students capacity ratio. This is the family filter. So friends, your church, at your church. We see this time and again. I'm thankful for our friends at Unstuck. They've looked at this for years. 30% of your attendance should be children and young people should be the students and kids at your church. Why is this an important issue? This ratio is not a nice to have. It is the strongest, it's the single strongest indicator of long term health of your church. If it's below this 30%, if it's below. If it's below 20% so it's like a third less. You've got a real problem. You're drawing adults but not reaching families. And without families, frankly your church doesn't have a future. You might be celebrating growth today, but let me say this as a person of a certain age. If you're just attracting older adults. Your church doesn't have a future. More adults in seats, busy lobby. But if kids are not in the mix, and if 30% of your audience is the people that attend on Sunday, if they are not students and young people, then the next generation is burning off. And you will. It'll just be. It's just a matter of time before your church begins to receive and lose its impact in its community. Parents may love the preaching, they may love the music, they may love the atmosphere, but if their kids do not come, and if you are not drawing parents with kids to your community, you are literally five years away from significant decline as a church. I was talking to a friend recently who literally experienced this at their church years ago. They were like, at first it started, we didn't have anybody in the nursery, and then it was, you know, the early elementary, then it was all of elementary. And then before you knew it, the church was in decline. So what percentage of your church is under 18 years of age? Don't guess, track it. This needs to be on a dashboard somewhere. Aim for 20 to 30%. 30% is the goal. If you're below 20%, families are slipping through the cracks. Above 30%, you're doing great as a church. Compare this ratio year over year. Let's go back the last number of years and look at where that was. Is the number stable or growing? Then you've got a future. If it's shrinking, then you might be in decline. Your church literally might just be getting a year older every year. And that spells problems for the future of your church. Listen to the leavers. Reach out to people who have maybe left your church, families that have left your church, and just simply ask them, hey, I'm not trying to convince you to come back, but I want to hear from you, I want to learn from you, tell lots of stories. Listen, we need next generation kids in our ministry. They need to be an active part of what happens at our church. Number five, staffing leverage. Stop hiring doers, start hiring leaders. Okay, this one might hurt a little bit. This one I know there's some people who are, they're not going to like this one at all. One of the problems with a growing church, a fast growing church, is more revenue comes in and there's a lot of work to be done and there's lots of things going on and you're going to be tempted, you're going to be tempted to add more staff. And the problem with that is if you add staff to your church, if you Overstaff your church, you're literally taking things away from volunteers and giving them to staff. If that's the behavior that's happening at your church, that's the beginning of decline for your church. It literally is. It's the beginning of the decline of your church. If it feels like you're understaffed, that's a good thing. Ephesians 4. We are called to be equippers. We're the people that are supposed to equip the saints to do the work their job is to do. Our job is to equip. So the numbers you're looking for here is you're looking for 75 attendees to one for every staff that you have. Ideally, actually 100 to one. But 75 to one is a good place to start. And you don't want to have any more than 50% of your budget associated with staff spending. Anything more than that, anything higher than that or worse than these ratios, you're beginning the steps towards decline as a church. And insidiously dangerous behavior is when the work flows from volunteers. Things that used to be done by volunteers are now being done by staff. You've got to watch for that. And literally we're looking for the reverse of that. Flow is the healthy thing. Things that are currently done by your staff, this is how your team is going to scale up. We need to envision them for a future where things that they currently do as a paid staff member to being done by volunteers. How do we build leaders who will give everything away? Look at the team members around you who are giving the most away. Those are the people that are helping your church scale and grow long term. What percentage of your adults serve regularly? It needs to be above 30%. It needs to be regular. We need to be finding ways to move people on. This becomes harder as we grow. Define job descriptions. Write out job descriptions of people's roles. Make sure that it's super clear what all these different varying levels of staff lead or volunteer leaders are doing. Launch a leadership pathway or pipeline to train, empower and release volunteers to lead in your ministry. Staff who insist on doing everything aren't heroes, they're bottlenecks. Staff who reach for another hire instead of mobilizing aren't scaling ministry, they're frankly slowing it down and maybe sowing the seeds of death in your ministry, even when you're at your peak. So coming down to land here, friends. You know, I once had a mentor of mine say that the decline of a church starts the day after its best day. If you're experiencing big attendance in this season. If you're experiencing incredible momentum, let's be thankful for that. God's doing an amazing thing in your church. But now is the time to think about what's actually happening at our church. Don't be fooled by just nickels and noses. Look under the hood. What are some of these dynamics that are taking place under the hood that you need to address now in this season to ensure what's going on will sustain for years, for decades to come? So run the numbers, capture all these rates, figure out where you're at, benchmark against others, set some targets, what are some ways, what are some activities we can need to take to move people towards seeing these numbers improve? Assign ownership, make sure that people on your team actually own these vital statistics. Communicate urgency. We want to celebrate that things are good, but don't be lulled into the sense that they're always going to be how they are now. Winter is coming. We need to work now to be ready to ensure that our churches are trending more towards health, not towards these eroding statistics that could be happening underneath our very feet. And then finally invest accordingly. You know, you're going to have to invest to make some changes here. You're going to have to move some staff around. You're going to have to find a way to, you know, maybe invest in some new systems, some new approaches to deal with the new reality of so many new people coming to your church. But we need to make those decisions now, move forward and work to improve the internal dynamics that are impacting our church for the long haul. Listen, growth is a gift. I'm thankful if your church is growing. Don't get me wrong on that, don't hear me wrong on that. But it's also a test. The question isn't are we growing? The question is, are we stewarding what's happening today to sustain this for the long haul? Don't let your church's growth kill your church's growth. Build the systems, strengthen the foundation and make the shift from a tall middle school kid who could scissor kick to the organization that can Fosbury flip over any high jump. Listen, I'm excited for you, friends. Thanks for being a part of Unseminary. We've got lots of resources to help with all this stuff, but appreciate you and what you're doing in your church. Take care.