Growth

How does a member keep growing after the first ninety days? This movement fails quietly. Nobody announces that they have stopped growing. They just stop, and if nobody is watching for it, a year goes by.

The test

Pick a member who joined eighteen months ago and is not a leader. Can you say what they are working on, who knows them well, and where they serve? If not, they are growing on their own or not at all, and you would not know which.

The conviction behind this movement

Growth is normal, and drift is normal too, so somebody has to be watching. No one announces that they have stopped growing. They go quiet, and a quiet member is indistinguishable from a content one unless a leader is actually looking.

The non-negotiable is attention: a leader who looks at their people every two or three weeks and does something about what they see. The six steps below are how you make that attention cheap enough to actually happen. If a step ever makes looking harder, drop the step, not the looking.

The six steps, in practice

1. Give them something to finish

Open-ended encouragement to grow produces very little. A course with sessions and an end produces a finished thing, and a person who finished one is far more likely to start another. Foundations first, then whatever your church believes people need next.

2. Find out how they are wired

Two short assessments do most of this work. One asks how they are built, the shape of how they lead, speak, decide and see. The other asks what they are gifted to do. Together they tell a leader who they are talking to before deciding where to put them.

The reason to do this early is that most misplacement in churches is not a character problem. It is putting a patient teacher into a job that needs a starter, or asking a mercy-gifted person to run logistics, and then wondering why they burned out.

3. Get them into a group

Being known by eight people beats being taught by one. Whatever your groups are called, the number that matters is how many members are in one, and the list that matters is of those who are not.

That list needs an owner. It is the single most useful piece of paper in a growth strategy and the one most churches have never printed.

4. Build a daily rhythm

A reading plan the group does together, a place to write down what they notice, a few verses worth carrying. The point is not volume. It is that following Jesus becomes something they do on a Tuesday and not only something they attend on a Sunday.

5. Put them to work

Serving is not the reward for maturity. It is one of the ways maturity happens. Someone who has been around for six months and has never been asked to do anything has been told something about their value whether you meant it or not.

6. Have leaders actually look

This is the step that holds the other five together. A leader who looks at their people every two or three weeks catches the drift while it is still a conversation. A leader who looks twice a year finds out at the exit interview.

Make it small enough to be real: what each person has done, when they were last active, and one thing to do next with them. That is a five-minute habit, not a report.

What good looks like

• Most members are in a group.
• Most have taken both assessments, and their leader has read them.
• Every leader has looked at their people within the last three weeks.
• You can name who is stalled this month, and somebody has reached out to them.

Where the software helps

Courses and reading plans assigned to a whole group at once, the two assessments and the reading they produce, a leader view showing each person's progress and what to do next with them, a way to write to one person from inside the platform, and a weekly summary telling a leader who could use a word from them. Nothing goes to a member that a leader did not write.

This playbook is AI-drafted, human-reviewed, and approved by a theological review. How our content is made.