Sometimes church growth isn’t about what you add. It’s about what you stop doing.
That’s a hard sell in ministry, because the instinct runs the other direction. Attendance is flat, so we launch an initiative. Something isn’t working, so we add a ministry. We need to move the needle, so we hire. More offerings, more programs, more on the calendar. It feels like leadership.
But when we look at the churches that are actually growing right now, a striking number of them got there by subtracting.
There’s a cooking version of this that makes the point better than a church illustration does. On a fine-dining show, a kitchen trying to make its dishes better keeps rediscovering the same principle: subtract. Reduce. Simplify. Strip the plate back and the flavors you were actually trying to feature finally come forward — and the food costs less to make, because you’re buying fewer ingredients.
Barbecue works the same way. You can spend years chasing the secret ingredient, the strange thing you put in the rub. At its core it’s still meat, salt, and pepper.
The gospel is simple. Our assignment is simple. And most of us have spent years making both of them complicated.
The Two Stats Behind This Conversation
60% of Protestant churches reported plateaued or declining attendance last year. That’s Pushpay’s number, and honestly it’s the most generous version of that stat we’ve seen — it leaves 40% growing, which would be great news if it holds.
Here’s the one that stopped us:
Only 8% of Protestant pastors say they’re extremely satisfied with their discipleship process.
Which means 92% of us are either quietly disappointed in ours or have made peace with it. It ain’t broke, don’t fix it. And most of our audience is somewhere in that 92% — we are too. Ask us whether we’re extremely satisfied with discipleship at our own church and the honest answer is no. Partly that’s temperament; some of us are tinkerers who aren’t extremely satisfied with anything. But it’s more than that. We want more people taking steps. We want more people getting discipled and into the growth track. The bones are right. The execution isn’t where we want it.
Hold onto that number, because it’s the thread running through everything below. Almost every one of these five subtractions ends up being about discipleship — either making room for it, or removing something that was quietly competing with it.
First, a Story About Chocolate
Before the list, one illustration that keeps earning its place.
My first pastoral assignment was a church in Northern California, 2003 to 2007. We had a thing that worked beautifully: anybody who came for the first time got a giant half-pound block of Hershey’s chocolate. And whoever brought them got a roll of Lifesavers — because you’re a lifesaver for bringing someone to church. Cost us real money. Nobody ever said no to a half pound of chocolate.
In 2013 I moved to a completely different environment: Madison, Wisconsin. I walked in and said, guys, I have the best idea ever. Got the team to buy all of it. Had it ready.
Crickets. Week after week. We knew there were visitors in the room — we’d ask, and no hands would go up. Nobody wanted the chocolate. Nobody wanted the Lifesavers.
Eventually one person raised a hand, and after that service my team finally leveled with me. They said: Thomas, we have to stop doing this. In that context, people were nervous enough about being at a church for the first time. Self-identifying in a room full of strangers and then carrying around a half-pound badge that announced this is my first time here — nobody was signing up for that. I wish they’d told me sooner. But they were right, and we killed it.
Worth noting that this only gets more true with younger visitors. Gen Z may be the most socially anxious generation yet. They are not raising their hand for the chocolate.
The tactic wasn’t wrong. It was wrong there. That distinction is most of this episode.
And While We’re Here: Announcements
A related thing worth celebrating, even though it isn’t on our list of five.
Church announcements used to run ten or fifteen minutes. Everything on the calendar, insider language, inside jokes, events three months out. For a lot of us that was the least favorite part of the service growing up. (For a surprising number of church people, it’s the favorite. We don’t understand it either.)
Over roughly the last decade, churches have finally trimmed this. Announce the two or three things that matter, put the rest in the bulletin or on social, and get to prayer over tithes and offerings and the message.
We made a whole video on how to do announcements that don’t suck, and the framework is feel, spiel, reel: make people feel something about the announcement, give them the spiel fast, then reel them in with an actual decision to make. We’ve also gone deeper on when in the service announcements should even happen.
And full disclosure — this is still a weekly fight for us. Getting announcements down to two or three minutes takes real work. It’s the “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one” problem. Subtraction is more effort than addition, not less.
Now the five.
1. They Stopped Copying Other Churches and Found Their Own Voice
There are a lot of churches in this country, and an enormous number of them look identical. Same social media, same aesthetic, same series graphics. If you were church shopping right now, most of them would blur together.
There was a time when matching the churches that were winning was the strategy, and that made sense. But with this much sameness in the market, the thing that actually gets attention now is whatever makes your church specifically yours.
The part worth keeping
We don’t want to throw this out entirely, because that would be dishonest about how we actually operate.
There’s a lot to learn from watching other churches. As a preacher, I want to hear how other people handled a passage I’m preaching. And almost every church I’ve ever been part of — including our current one — runs some modified version of Rick Warren’s Class 101/201/301 for getting people assimilated. I’ve taught those same ideas in four different formats at four different churches. You don’t have to reinvent everything.
The part that has to go
The line gets crossed when we stop learning and start emulating — importing what’s working in a completely different context and expecting it to land in ours. That’s exactly the chocolate bar. California yes, Wisconsin no.
We build websites and run marketing for churches all over the country, and we see it constantly: Elevation elements, Life Church elements, Saddleback elements, showing up as slightly worse copies in churches with none of the same context. Life Church largely got Summer at the Movies rolling, and now it’s everywhere. There are almost certainly hundreds of churches this weekend building a sermon around some wordplay on Odyssey, because that’s what the culture is talking about and because a bigger church did it first.
The better instinct is to adapt the concept, not the tactic. The chocolate thing was never really about chocolate — it was about rewarding people for bringing a friend and making a first-timer feel seen. That goal is completely valid in Wisconsin. The execution just had to change so it stopped spotlighting the person it was trying to welcome.
So: prayerfully consider your context, your assignment, and what your church actually needs to hear. That’s your primary model. What’s working at other churches is a secondary or even tertiary input.
The uncomfortable reason we copy
Here’s the part that’s harder to say out loud.
We’d guess 99% of pastors reading this don’t have “become a megachurch” as the goal. You want to grow in your community, because you love the families in your community and you want more of them in the room. That’s the point of a church.
But we’d push back a little on our own framing there, because there’s a version of this that’s less tidy. Pastors are often insecure. I’d never say out loud that I want my church to grow so I can prove to myself and everyone around me that I’m an effective communicator and leader — but I have to do actual work to keep my heart in check on it. My motivation is at least partly tainted with wanting to make a name for myself, or with plain entrepreneurial ambition. That’s real, and a lot of pastors wrestle with it whether they’ll admit it or not.
That’s a big part of why megachurch copying happens. You watch someone preach a certain way, see the applause and the shares, and want some of that for yourself. It’s rarely that calculated or that conscious. But it’s there, and it’s worth naming, because the goal was supposed to be that he increases and I decrease.
Which is the real argument against emulation. Copy another church to get their results and you’re already chasing the wrong thing.
A useful question to sit with, then: why does your church exist? Why haven’t you all disbanded and joined the other churches in town? Whatever the answer is — the thing about your community that makes this worth continuing — that’s your voice. For us in Hawaii, a whole set of things are simply different because we live here. Your version of that is what you should be leaning into.
2. They Stopped Adding Programs
Look at your Sunday morning as blocks of time. Welcome, five minutes. Worship, thirty. Announcements, ten. Intro video. Breakout. Activity. How many sub-blocks are inside that ninety-minute container?
Then zoom out, because this is much bigger than Sunday, and much bigger than youth ministry. It’s every program your church runs.
Today you have to consciously resist the pull to add ministries — especially at small and mid-sized churches. And a lot of that pull, again, comes from copying: we look at the megachurch across town that offers everything, and we forget they have the staff, the facilities, and the budget for everything.
Our typical listener pastors a church somewhere between 75 and 500 people. If that’s you, you are almost certainly better off reducing your number of ministries than adding to it.
What we cut
Some context on our own church, because we’re not theorizing here. Historically we were an attractional church — genuinely the church that launched the attractional model in Hawaii. Motorcycles ridden onto the stage. Big dance numbers at Easter. If it were a different era there’d have been a Summer at the Movies. That model probably peaked around 2014 or 2015, and we were late to leave it. COVID basically forced the issue and made us ask what our actual assignment in this community was.
Getting there meant cutting a lot of ministries. And to be clear: they were all good. We have no complaint about any of them. We had a large hula ministry with performances at least monthly — a distinctly Hawaii thing most of you won’t have. We had a marketplace ministry for business leaders with monthly gatherings, annual meetings, golf tournaments. Several others.
What’s left is basically three things: life groups, our growth track, and a ministry we call Life Change. That’s the whole ask. And everything else now happens inside that structure. Big women’s Bible study? It breaks into life groups. Growth track? It breaks into life groups partway through. We put all our effort behind one primary thing — getting people into a life group — instead of the buckshot approach of offering 75 ministries and telling people to pick whichever feels right.
At a church of 300, we simply couldn’t do all of that as well as we wanted to. Almost nobody your size can.
Here’s a Lifeway number that makes the cost of the buckshot approach concrete: only 11% of pastors believe their church does discipleship better than the other things it does. Better than the events, the lunches, the programs. Eleven percent. Church essentially is discipleship — and we’ve built calendars where it’s not even the thing we’re best at.
Pick your two or three pillars
Get your team in a room and go back to the foundation. What was the sentence, or the three pillars, that defined this ministry when it started? What’s the point? Then distill down to that.
The answer is legitimately different for different churches. A ton of young families in the room means family ministry is probably a pillar. A lot of retirees means something else is. That’s fine — the discipline isn’t picking the right three, it’s picking three at all.
And there’s a real benefit on the receiving end that pastors underrate. As someone sitting in the seats at our church: every week, the announcements are one of those same three things. Life groups. How to get connected to a life group. The Life Change session coming up. Over and over. Which makes it obvious what I’m supposed to do as a member — what to sign up for, what to look at next. If it were three different things every week, I’d have no idea what my next step was, and the announcements would be twice as long. The narrow focus isn’t just cheaper to run. It’s easier to be discipled by.
3. They Stopped Treating Sunday as the Only Front Door
Our favorite stat: 70% of people engage with a church online before ever visiting in person.
We’re going to be honest about this one — it’s been floating around for years and nobody can actually produce the original source. So take the specific number with a grain of salt. But directionally, come on. Just this week someone watched one of our church’s TikToks and commented asking what time service starts, and our social media manager got to answer them and start a conversation. That’s the front door, live, on a Tuesday.
Even the exception mostly isn’t an exception. Sure, occasionally someone gets invited by a friend and walks in cold. But if a friend invited me, I’d still pull up the website and the Instagram before I showed up. First impressions are formed online now almost without exception — a reel, a Google ad, a sermon clip, an about page.
Here’s the version of this that should sting a little.
How much time and money have you put into that first in-person touch point? Parking lot volunteers directing people to the right building. Greeters at the door handing out the bulletin, trained on how to say good morning. Hopefully a lot — it matters enormously, and I’ll die on the hill that the parking-lot-to-seat experience is as important as it’s ever been. Every study says people decide whether they’re coming back before they even sit down.
Now: how much of that same effort has gone into your website, your Instagram, your YouTube channel? Because for most visitors, that’s where the greeting actually happens first.
You’d never tolerate a greeter with a bad attitude who mumbles at people. It would sour the whole visit. A confusing, outdated social media presence does exactly the same thing — it just does it where you can’t see it. And that’s the brutal part: you will never meet the people who had a bad online experience. They don’t show up to tell you.
We know this is uncomfortable if you came up in a different era. It’s genuinely harder. But it’s where the decision is being made — usually in the first few seconds of a reel or a Plan Your Visit page, where someone decides whether they’d fit at your church and whether you’ve earned a Sunday morning from them.
There’s real upside here too. When somebody has already vetted you online and decided they could be comfortable, their stickiness after a first visit is higher than it’s ever been. Which brings us to the thing that used to be assumed and isn’t anymore: not long ago, a visitor’s first encounter with us was Sunday. I had someone come up after I preached recently, and when I said I was glad they got to hear me, they said, actually, this is the third time we’ve heard you speak — we’ve been listening for weeks before coming in. Even we still make that assumption. It’s mostly a blast from the past. If you want more on how that shift is playing out, we’ve dug into it.
4. They Stopped Siloing Families
Only 33% of Christians are actively helping someone else grow in faith. That’s Barna.
We think a big reason is that a lot of churches are quietly built on this arrangement: we do the ministry, you bring the people. Invite your friends, bring your family, and once you’re in the building it’s on us. We’ll do the worship for you. We’ll preach for you. We’ll run all of it.
That was never going to scale. Your staff will always be a tiny fraction of your congregation, at any size. What growing churches are doing instead is letting discipleship cascade across the whole body and across generations — from the lead pastor all the way down to the kids in children’s ministry, with people connecting outside the family unit they walked in with.
We’ll be straight: our church is average at this. We believe in intergenerational ministry and we see some of it — our life group spans about a 30- to 35-year age range, with people significantly older and younger than us in it. But in actual practice there are churches well ahead of us here, and it’s an active conversation on our team right now. Someone came to us just this week wanting to see young people in the worship service at least occasionally. Currently the only time our kids are in the room for the whole service is when the air conditioning breaks in children’s ministry — which happened two weeks ago. That instinct, that a full-fledged separate children’s ministry is non-negotiable, is another thing we inherited from the attractional era.
What this actually looked like for me
I grew up in a home church — six core families, plus others who came and went. Three generations in the room: my parents’ generation, then the teenagers and young adults, then a group of little kids.
Every week we’d break out to discuss the message or study together, and the groups were built on one rule: almost nobody in your group is related to you. One adult man and one adult woman who weren’t married to each other. Teenagers who weren’t their kids. Little kids who weren’t anybody’s siblings.
That structure did something I’ve never seen replicated by accident. The adults in those groups mostly weren’t the ones preaching or leading — this gave them a real discipleship role. It gave me wisdom from adults who weren’t my parents, which lands differently no matter how good your parents are. And it put me, a teenager who didn’t know much, in an older-brother role with younger kids, passing on the little I did have. All of us came out of it more connected and the whole community came out stronger.
I saw a version of this at a church with an actual building too — one about the size of the church I’m at now, just starting to really invest in family ministry. Big corporate focus on intergenerational discipleship in the service, and then the same concept applied to how small groups ran, how Bible studies worked, how events were built. It works at that scale. It just has to be designed on purpose.
My read on the fruit: young people who grow up in that environment are, in general, better discipled. That’s anecdotal — I don’t have a stat that proves it. But look at where those people are ten years later. They’re leading. They’re discipling other people. They’re in ministry. And it makes intuitive sense: watching your dad raise his hands in worship, having an adult who isn’t your dad actually listen to your take on a passage — it forces everyone in the room to interact with the gospel instead of consuming it.
The honest downside
It’s less pleasant. That’s the trade, and pretending otherwise doesn’t help anybody.
If you’re new, or frankly if you’re anybody, sitting next to a hungry and cranky four-month-old during the sermon is hard. Kids make noise. Services get disrupted. There are ways to manage it, but it doesn’t go away.
Which is why we think this might be the final boss of moving away from attractional church. Everything else on this list you can do while still optimizing for a smooth, comfortable, produced Sunday experience. This one asks you to give some of that up. But the move away from siloing is real, and it’s worth wrestling with at your church this year.
5. They Stopped Waiting for People to Come Back
A growing church knows the sermon, the worship, and the welcome on someone’s first visit are only the beginning. Connection happens well past that. So instead of hope we see you again, they build a system that makes coming back easy.
Everything above actually feeds this. The narrower your ministry focus, the more crystal clear you can be about what someone’s next step is. You can’t communicate a clean next step out of 75 options.
And the target is specific: get them to a third visit. Once someone hits three, the likelihood they stick goes through the roof. Build your entire communication pattern toward that one milestone. We went deep on the whole system in Your Church’s Follow-Up Strategy Is Broken, and we’ve put our actual visitor follow-up templates into a free download you’re welcome to steal outright.
The Sunday afternoon text
The single biggest home run for us: if your church is under 500 people and you’re seeing fewer than about 15 visitors a weekend, whoever preached that Sunday texts every first-time visitor that afternoon.
Not a staff member. Not a volunteer team. The person who just spoke. Our lead pastor is on sabbatical, so lately that’s often been me, but we’ve both committed to it.
The text is three sentences:
Hey, it was so good that you came today. I’m sorry I didn’t get a chance to meet you — or, so glad I got to meet you and your family. Can I be praying for you about anything?
That’s the whole thing. The reply rate is very high, and it sets the tone for the entire relationship. The person everybody just spent thirty minutes listening to took time on a Sunday afternoon to reach out to them. That’s hard to manufacture any other way.
Obviously a church of 8,000 with 400 visitors a weekend can’t have the lead pastor doing this. The system should still exist — you just need people running it. But at the size most of you are, this costs fifteen minutes and outperforms almost anything else you could do with that time.
The math that should convince you
The average return rate for a second visit is about 10%. Somebody visits your church, and there’s a one-in-ten chance they come back. Churches that work a genuinely good follow-up process get it to roughly 25%.
At first glance that sounds bleak — only one in four, even after all that work? But run it forward.
- 100 first-time guests at 10% → 10 new people joining your church.
- 100 first-time guests at 25% → 25.
Do that every quarter and you’re the difference between a church that grew by 100 people this year and a church that grew by 40 — and 40 probably didn’t even keep pace with the people who left.
Said the other way: a good follow-up process means you need dramatically fewer first-time guests to grow. Which is a much easier problem to solve than manufacturing more visitors.
The Through-Line
Read the five together and they’re one move made five times: subtract, so the thing that matters gets your full attention.
Stop copying, and you get your own voice back. Stop over-programming, and discipleship gets your calendar and your volunteers. Stop treating Sunday as the front door, and you start investing where the first impression is actually happening. Stop siloing, and discipleship stops being a staff function. Stop waiting, and the people who already walked in the door actually stay.
None of that requires a new hire, a new building, or a new initiative. Most of it requires the harder thing — deciding what good ministry you’re willing to end.
Do that, and you’ve got a real shot at joining the 40%.
Your Next Step
Not sure what’s working and what’s just taking up room? We offer a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at your website, your Google presence, your social media, and your digital front door — then send back honest, specific recommendations you can actually use. No sales pitch. Real feedback.
Turnaround is about 48 hours. It’s free for any church that asks.
More Resources
- Your Church’s Follow-Up Strategy Is Broken (Here’s How to Fix It)
- 9 Things That Kill Church Growth (And What to Do Instead)
- The New Outreach Playbook: What Growing Churches Do Differently
- I’d Stop 80% of Church Marketing Tomorrow (Here’s Why)
- Does Your Church Have a Front Door or a Back Door Problem?
- When to Do Announcements in Church: Pros and Cons
