Every person needs security. Every person needs to belong. Every person needs to believe that he or she has influence. Everybody needs self-esteem. When a church lives up to the potential God has given it, no organization does these things better.
Herb Miller
What do you do if you discover your Sunday school is actually repelling instead of attracting visitors? Don Michael McDonald, teacher of an adult class in the Community Bible Church of San Bernardino, California, had a comfortable, informative class just like thousands of others, but that’s the question he had to face. Knowing people join niches and not just churches, he was determined to find out what was wrong and how to make his niche attractive to newcomers.
As a result of what McDonald learned and put into practice, the class began to grow about 10 percent each month, and by the end of a year it had reached an average attendance of sixty-five. Perhaps the best indicator the new strategy was working was that 80 percent of class visitors returned. Here McDonald explains what he learned and how he made the turnaround.
David and Beverly stood in the doorway of the adult Sunday school class and looked over a sea of unfamiliar faces. Beverly had coaxed for weeks to get David there. Their first child was due in four months, and Beverly wanted that child to have a church home. David kept citing a bad experience with “religious people,” but he was finally willing to try church again since they had just moved to this area.
Maybe this time I’ll meet some nice people, David thought.
Maybe this time, Beverly prayed, someone in there will introduce David to Jesus.
I shudder to think how many Davids and Beverlys visited our class and walked away with needs unmet. We didn’t realize it, but we weren’t giving them a chance.
Our pastor first noticed the problem. He called one evening and asked if I would join him for breakfast at a local restaurant. “Sure,” I said. “What’s up?”
“We need to talk about the couples class.”
I wasn’t sure what he was driving at. Our class was well established; it had existed for fifteen of our church’s thirty-five years, and I had taught or cotaught the group for eight years. If anything, we were typical. I took up the offering and taught a Bible lesson. My wife, Judy, did everything else.
As we met that morning, the pastor pointed out that slowly, almost imperceptibly, our class was losing attendance. In a year’s time our average attendance had dropped from twenty-five to twenty.
“Growth occurs on the edges,” he said, “and you’re not taking in new people.” I didn’t have any answers, but then, neither did the pastor. In the following months, however, as we prayed about and pondered the situation, we came to several conclusions.
Know Thy Purpose
We had begun a guest book several months earlier. As Judy and I examined it, we realized many people had visited, but we didn’t recognize any of the names. None had ever returned! As a matter of fact, we couldn’t think of any regular attenders who had been coming less than three years.
Why not? I worked hard on those Bible lessons. Our group seemed to enjoy studying God’s Word and praying together.
We thought about what makes visitors come and realized it is usually because they have tried the worship hour, liked it, and are looking for deeper involvement. Bible study happens many places, but accepting new members begins in Sunday school.
Judy and I set a goal: have one visitor feel accepted and return. We defined acceptance as never having to feel or say, “I’m an outsider.” With this in mind, we began to see contradictions between what we wanted and what we did.
Intimate or Accepting?
The class cannot be intimate and accepting at the same time, we found.
Our format felt comfortable. People entered and sat in a semicircle. We took an offering and asked for announcements, typically someone’s illness and the need for a few meals to be brought over. Someone else often told of a recent answer to prayer. This led into conversational prayer and thanksgiving. Next, we turned to our Bible lesson, continued from the previous week. We closed with prayer.
Our regular attenders enjoyed the format and grew spiritually with it. But if we wanted to accept newcomers, something had to change. Our pastor asked one man why he and his wife didn’t attend our class. The man shook his head. “I can’t go in there again. They pray out loud. I can’t do that.” That man didn’t feel comfortable praying by himself, much less eavesdropping on the prayers of people he didn’t know.
Intimacy among old-timers is desirable, but the visitor calls it a clique. We decided to sacrifice intimacy if it prevented an accepting atmosphere. We knew scolding the regular attenders would not help. So we began to experiment with the class format.
We arranged the chairs in small circles and noticed an immediate change in attendance. We leaped from an average of twenty to twelve. If David and Beverly had walked through the door then, they would have been afraid to sit anywhere. If they began a circle, they would have had to sweat it out waiting for someone else, a stranger, to sit by them. On the other hand, if others were already seated, David and Beverly would fear taking the seats next to someone waiting for an old friend. We returned to the “one big arch” arrangement but with something learned. There are levels of fellowship, and I was asking the people for too much commitment too soon.
Acceptance One Step at a Time
Acceptance comes when the class offers natural steps to involvement. We created a progression, repeating it each week in case other newcomers dropped in.
1. We began with no one seated. A person walking in would see people standing and sipping coffee or tea, talking from behind the protective shield of a Styrofoam cup. At the call to order, everyone chose seats (from multiple rows) at the same time.
2. We required no previous experience with the group. Prearranged announcements covered only upcoming events and programs. The lesson began with humor but not inside jokes; locking a visitor out of the punch line is fatal to growth.
We found singing worked poorly with fewer than thirty, because each person perceived his or her voice as too conspicuous. When we did sing, we kept songs simple and made words available, often displaying them up front so newcomers weren’t the only ones looking at the words.
The lessons did not require knowledge from the previous week. For serial topics, we began each lesson by summarizing salient points from the previous lessons.
3. We required no previous experience with the Bible. The text was stated at the beginning of the lesson. Once people realized they needed Bibles, we offered them to everyone who did not have them, with the day’s key verse already marked.
For those who had brought Bibles, we briefly explained how to find the key verse. The first time I explained that Psalms was in the middle of the Bible, one of our regulars laughed. But now our old-timers realize the person next to them truly may not know.
We geared questions to opinion, personal experience, or what could be answered solely from the morning’s text.
4. We prepared people for greater participation. I asked people to form small circles only after they had milled around, chosen seats, and heard some content. And first I would instruct each person to be prepared to give first and last names and to answer a simple question about himself or herself. By having a few seconds to prepare their comments, people were not as apprehensive about starting conversations.
We had people jot their thoughts before we asked them to talk with the five or six people they’d just met. Only then did we ask for volunteers to answer the question before everyone. As a result, timid people began speaking up more. Sometimes we’d hear, “Mark had a good answer. Go ahead, Mark. Tell him what you told us.”
5. We discouraged natural group selection. We formed circles by various methods — parts of town the attenders were from, or birthdays. This kept old friends from clustering at the expense of newcomers.
In addition, we offered other avenues for meeting needs of deeper intimacy and Bible study. Regular attenders were encouraged to participate in supplemental Bible studies. We handled intimate prayer requests through auxiliary prayer chains. We invited people to join groups of four couples that would get together once a month for three months. After a while, 50 percent of the regular attenders were participating continuously.
We encouraged regulars to develop a ministry mentality. Once every five or six weeks we discussed how to help newcomers: What help do people need when new in town? What would make a newcomer comfortable in a crowd of strangers? Why do we structure the class this way? A new couple that Sunday would catch us talking about them, but the subject was how much we wanted them. Over the door of the classroom we placed the following acrostic: ttdctflooc. It stands for “Through this door come the future leaders of our church.” Regulars know they can no longer assume the person in the next chair is even a believer.
Our Class Grew
The class may have thought it was just another Sunday the first week a visitor returned, but Judy and I saw it as God’s answer to our prayer. During the following months, we had to bring in more chairs. Our average weekly attendance began to climb about 10 percent each month. Within five months, attendance averaged about thirty. When one year had passed, we were sharing God’s Word with sixty or seventy each week. During that year, 80 percent of class visitors returned. Some didn’t return, of course, and some regular attenders left, but for every attender lost we gained four.
If growth had been in numbers only, we could claim no real gain. But our regular attenders began looking for opportunities to reach out to others and take an interest in their spiritual needs. Remember the man who said he couldn’t pray aloud? He attends now, and recently he told Judy and me how he led his son in prayer for salvation.
Some might object, “But people don’t like changes in our church.” Remember, our class was in a rut worn fifteen years deep. Even established classes can change.
Others might object, “But we have no visitors.” We were fortunate to have occasional drop-ins. One person told me that until recently he had never been motivated to bring friends. “Why expose them to a situation you know they won’t like?” An accepting atmosphere helps people risk bringing a friend.
As the class has grown, more people have become involved by necessity. That, too, makes the class more meaningful to them. Before the change, Judy and I got tired of doing everything. Now, about 30 percent of the attenders help by bringing refreshments or leading outside Bible studies. People volunteer when they see their efforts will count. We first had to demonstrate that something was happening, that our class had a purpose. We’ve focused ours on acceptance.
“You know,” said David as he and Beverly left the class after visiting a while ago, “that guy who sat next to me has the same carburetor problem with his car. I want to talk to him next week.”
Copyright ©1988 Christianity Today
