You likely have a big launch coming some Sunday this fall. A kickoff weekend, small groups restarting, one hard push to gather people back after a scattered summer. Let me tell you what that day can do for you, and what it can't.
The room will be full on that launch morning. But then October will come, the crowd will settle back down, and you’ll start wondering whether any of it mattered. It did, but not for the reason you were hoping. Big days create momentum; they don't keep it.
So the real question isn't: How big can your launch be? The real question is this: What catches the crowd once it gathers? Momentum is far easier to keep than to create.
Jesus said, "I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives" (John 12:24 NLT).
The harvest is real, but something has to be buried first. In a church, it's rarely a program. It's usually somebody's tradition, or somebody's sense of control.
A big day creates the crowd
Big days work by pyramiding. You're down at one level, and then you go high on a big day. When it's over, you come back down, but not as far down as you were before. Then you plan another big day, and when it’s over, your numbers are a little higher again.
Before our first public service at Saddleback, we were running about 20 people in a home Bible study. We did a big mailout for Easter, and 205 people showed up. Then we averaged 120 for the rest of that month. So, during that Easter month of April 1980, we ended up picking up 100 people.
After that, we tried to make Easter the mental picture of what we wanted to be averaging a year later. That's the real work a big day does. It hands your people a photograph of what you're asking them to believe in.
New units catch it
But a photograph doesn't hold anyone. A crowd with nowhere to go on the second Sunday is just a good memory by the third. So you have to create new units so there's somewhere for new people to go. That might look like new classes, new small groups, or new services.
The loudest objection to starting a second service is usually the exact reason you need one. When people say, "If we go to two services, I won't know everybody anymore," they've just told you what the real ceiling is. A church of 80 or 90 people probably has eight small groups of about 10 people each. Once a small group gets past 10, it stops working, because somebody quietly stops talking.
This is why new groups have to keep coming. Consistent growth is the result of a consistent process, not of an unrelated schedule of big events. Churches that pull off the big event and open nothing new afterward watch the church sit at the same size and wonder why they even bothered. Growth happens month by month by month.
So before you print anything for your fall launch, count the new places a person could land afterward. If the answer is none, you're about to spend six weeks of energy filling a room you can't hold.
Control is what drops it
If the answer is more than none, brace yourself. Those new places will fill, and the first complaint you hear won't be about the crowd.
Right when growth starts working, you'll hear something that sounds like a shepherding failure. "Pastor just isn't around anymore. There are so many people here now, I don't feel like anybody cares about me."
I call this the care/control conflict. People often complain about not being cared for when the real issue is that they're losing control. What's often underneath it is this: “I used to be a big fish in a little pond, and now the pond got bigger and I didn't get bigger.”
The average person knows 62 people, whether the church has 70, 700, or 7,000, so nobody needs to know everyone to feel like it's their church. Care is legitimate, and you meet it by multiplying small groups. Control is a need you cannot meet in a growing church.
The worst thing you can do is turn all the decision-making back into a bureaucracy to soothe it. That feels responsive. It's how a church chooses its old size on purpose.
So if you can't hold a crowd by caring harder, and you can't hold it by handing the church back to a committee, how can you hold it?
People are what hold it
People are what hold a crowd. I learned this the expensive way. In our first year, I worked 18 hours a day with no staff, and on the last Sunday of that year I stood up to preach and fainted in front of everybody. I was in my mid-20s and completely emotionally and physically out of gas.
In January of 1981, I took a month off and went out to the desert. At the end of it, God said to me, "Rick, you focus on building people and I'll build the church. It's my church." What we later called “purpose driven” was never a church-growth strategy. It's a people-development strategy, and growth is the byproduct.
So plan the big day, pastor. Fill the room and let your people see what a crowd looks like. Then go build the small groups and classes that will still be there in October, and loosen your grip enough that God has room to work. That's what catches a crowd.
You already know how to create momentum. It costs six weeks and a mailing list. Keeping it costs a few new classes and a looser hold on the church. The crowd is God’s to keep. The people you build are your job.
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