How do you help newcomers integrate into the life of your church? How can people volunteer to serve on teams, start giving to your church, renew their DBS/safeguarding requirements or join a small group?
Church life is full of invitations for people to respond and connect. - So how do we make it easy for people to do this. And how can we ensure that their experience of responding is efficient, effective and consistent - no matter what day or time they respond, and who they respond to? Jane is great at helping newcomers connect, but Jane is on holiday at the moment… If your plan for helping people connect relies on luck or a specific person being available to share the correct information, you may be leaving too much to chance.
The introduction of effective workflows may help. When your church is relatively small, an informal approach may be sufficient. As your church grows, developing your structures and systems may be necessary to help produce the same impact. After all, spotting and welcoming a new family within a congregation of 50 people should be fairly easy. The same approach won’t be sufficient when you have 500 people. (And you’re only going to become a church of 500, if you can welcome and integrate newcomers well!)
We will have the impact we are structured to have.
When we are designing our structures, we need to ensure they are sufficient and optimised for the next size we’re going to be, not the size we currently are. If our systems and structures suit the size we are, we will most likely stay the size we are.
At UCAN, we love workflows. Whether these are manual workflows (operating without software), or automated processes on church management systems, they can help us have the impact we want to have.
Below are two youtube videos, recorded at sessions we have hosted on the effective use of workflows.
The first is a webinar called Next Steps which explores how workflows can be used to support Newcomers integration, Volunteer recruitment and encouraging giving. The second is a recording of the ‘Let it Flow’ workflow seminar from our 2022 residential Cutting Edge conference. We hope they will be useful to you, as you explore using workflows and seek to implement them for increasingly consistent, repeatable, scalable and effective church ministry. If you want to talk further, please get in touch or visit our UCAN members forum on facebook.