Most church growth advice gets repeated far more often than it gets tested.
If you’ve been in church leadership for more than five minutes, somebody has handed you a book, a framework, or a strategy that was supposed to change everything. Some of it is genuinely great. Some of it is recycled from a conference in 2011 and hasn’t worked since. Almost none of it comes with a label telling you which is which.
So we took ten of the most common pieces of church growth advice and ranked them.
The Ranking System
Three tiers, and we’re committing to the terminology:
- Banger — good advice. Put it into practice.
- Mid — real upside, real limits. Depends heavily on your context.
- Cap — skip it. (Technically cap means somebody’s lying, which isn’t quite what we mean, but it’s the best word available.)
Here’s where each one landed.
1. Invest Heavily in Kids and Student Ministry — High Mid
This one sits right on the line between mid and banger, and it lands on the mid side almost entirely because of the word heavily.
The underlying idea is sound. Families are one of the two most common types of churchgoer, so kids and students aren’t a side ministry — they’re a huge share of who actually walks in your doors. Two years ago my church decided to hire a full-time youth pastor before we were technically the size that warranted one. We didn’t have the need yet. We hired anyway. The returns have been fantastic, and the same has been true of our kids ministry.
So this isn’t a knock on the priority. It’s a knock on the framing.
The problem with invest heavily in X as growth advice is that “heavily” implies a recipe, and this isn’t one. Pouring everything into student ministry can quietly starve areas that matter just as much. And it’s not an automatic home run — you don’t spend the money and watch growth appear. In fact, growing your church this way takes longer than almost any other method on this list.
The way I put it to our children’s pastor: we need to lead children’s ministry as if our next pastor — the one who’ll be leading when we’re old — is in that room right now. That’s the correct time horizon. It’s the same reason civilizations that invest in education are the ones that eventually innovate and flourish. You sow a lot at the front end and you don’t reap it for years. Worth doing. Just don’t confuse it with a growth lever you can pull this quarter.
Verdict: high mid. Do it. Don’t expect it to move your attendance numbers this year.
2. “Healthy Things Grow” — Mid
This one’s a quote more than a strategy, and it usually carries an implied argument: if you’re not growing, something is unhealthy.
There’s real truth in it. When churches decline or plateau for a long season, there’s very often something unhealthy underneath. And healthy things genuinely are attractive — one of us spent a year at a ministry school attached to a church that would now be considered a megachurch, and the leadership team there was so humble, so wise, so genuinely focused on ministering to the Lord that people were simply drawn in. You could feel it. That church grew because it was healthy.
The problem is what people do with the statement in reverse.
If healthy things grow, then growing things must be healthy — and that inference is where it gets dangerous. We’ve all watched ministries accelerate, put up incredible numbers, and turn out to be deeply unhealthy in the middle. Eventually it comes to light and it crumbles, and it’s heartbreaking every time. Growth is not a health certificate.
The other issue is that it isn’t actionable. Reduced to advice, “healthy things grow” becomes “make your church healthier,” which is a whole library of work compressed into three words. True, but not something you can do on Monday.
Verdict: mid. True as a statement. Nearly useless as a strategy, and actively harmful when run backwards.
3. Prioritize Small Groups and Home-Based Community — Banger (With a Caveat)
This one’s close to a straight banger, and the caveat is about size.
You cannot effectively disciple people at mass scale. If you’re a church of 40, you can do a lot of discipleship programmatically in the corporate setting — you probably still run groups, but they aren’t the whole strategy. If you’re a church of 500 or 5,000, good luck discipling anyone well from the pulpit alone. At that size, small groups are where most of your resources should be going, because you’re building a network of people who can disciple in ways you structurally cannot from the stage.
So: mid for churches under 100, banger for churches over 100.
One of us grew up in a home church — a small community of families that made up basically the entire ministry experience of childhood — and it was incredible. We’re in a life group together now at our own church, and we’ve watched churches around us put more weight on this over the last few years and get real fruit from it.
The Honest Caveat About House Churches
Here’s the tension worth naming, since this is church growth advice and not just ministry advice.
House churches are excellent at going deep. They’re bad at going wide.
They disciple individuals extraordinarily well. Some of the most engaged, radical followers of Jesus we’ve met came out of house church settings. (Some people also use house churches as a landing pad while deconstructing away from organized religion, which is a different conversation.) But despite a shelf of books proposing self-replicating networks of house churches that evangelize their communities, neither of us has actually watched one thrive at evangelism and multiplication in practice. It’s a genuinely hard ask.
So if the question is how do we grow, home-based community is good at growing people, not necessarily numbers. Which may be more important anyway. But be clear-eyed about which one you’re buying.
Verdict: banger past 100 people. Just don’t expect small groups to be your front door — see how growing churches find and develop home group leaders.
4. Preach Relevant, Felt-Needs Sermons to Attract Seekers — Cap
Immediate cap. No hesitation.
This is the attractional model — identify the pain point people are feeling right now, preach to it, keep the gospel maximally palatable, and pull in as many people as possible. It had a genuine run, mostly through the 2000s. Real people came to faith in Jesus through it, and we don’t want to dismiss the labor or the calling of the people wired for that kind of ministry. Plenty of people have been blessed by writers and preachers in that lane who do nothing for us personally. That’s fine. Not every ministry is for every person.
But as a growth strategy in 2026, it’s finished, for two reasons.
You cannot out-attract a phone. The attractional model was, at bottom, competing to be the best thing somebody could experience on a Sunday. We are not going to beat Netflix or HBO Max at production value. That was a losable battle in 2005 and it’s an unwinnable one now — we will lose it, permanently, to the culture and to media.
People are hungrier than that. They’re willing to take some push. They want to hear what Christians actually believe, taught seriously, hard parts included, chips falling where they may. We’ve been rewarded in ministry for exactly that, and the broader evidence agrees: most of the attractional churches are plateaued or declining. Meanwhile, when we went through the Church Influence 100 and Pastor Influence 100 lists, the fastest-growing and most influential churches on them are preaching genuinely hard truths — not feel-good self-help.
The model didn’t just go out of style. It stopped working.
Verdict: cap. Preach the actual thing. See our take on preaching that actually holds people.
5. “Your Sunday Experience Is Your Brand” — We Split On This One
This is where we genuinely disagreed, so here’s both sides.
The case for mid: whether or not you run groups, whether or not you have other on-ramps, most people’s first real experience of your church still happens on a Sunday morning. So put your best foot forward, especially for visitors. There are too many studies showing people decide whether they’ll come back within roughly ten seconds — the parking lot, the greeter, the first impression — to treat it as optional. Most of our staff meetings are spent reviewing what worked and what didn’t on Sunday. We just spent money on new cameras partly for that reason. You need at least a baseline of excellence here, and neglecting it will cost you. But it isn’t the end-all-be-all.
The case for cap: by the time someone walks through your door, they’ve already cleared a dozen hurdles. They’re substantially bought in already. The Sunday experience is no longer anyone’s first encounter with your church — your website is. Your social media is. People don’t show up willy-nilly anymore; culture has changed, and people are careful with their time, energy, and money. We check reviews before we pick a restaurant. Your visitors did the equivalent before they picked you.
So the honest correction is this: your Sunday experience is not your brand. It’s half of it. The other half is your digital front door — your website, your social presence, your Plan Your Visit page — and it’s the half most churches under-fund, because it’s the half they can’t see happening.
Verdict: mid, trending cap if it’s crowding out everything upstream of Sunday.
6. Copy What the Fastest-Growing Church in Your City Is Doing — Cap
Cap, with a real amendment attached.
Context is everything, and their context is not yours. If “copy them” means preach the gospel without restraint the way they do — sure, copy that. In one sense every church on earth should have roughly the same mission statement: go and make disciples, worship God, in our specific place. We’re all copying each other there.
But copying strategy is a different thing. There’s always an “it” pastor whose cadence and delivery start showing up in pulpits everywhere. We all do it a little. It is not a recipe for growth.
That said, we don’t want to throw the whole thing out, because inspiration is real. We’ve been fighting our ProPresenter lyrics for years — slides landing late, the usual. Then I saw a church doing something clever with the graphic design of their lyric slides, emphasizing one word per slide in a bolder, different font so it stood out. I thought it was fantastic and implemented it at our church. Was that wrong? Of course not. Did our church blow up as a result? Also no.
The Better Version of This Advice
Instead of copying from a distance, build real relationships with the other churches in your community. Learn from them directly. Tell each other what’s working and what isn’t. Pray for each other.
We’ve seen this work best in youth ministry, where the leaders from a bunch of churches in our area get together consistently and trade honest notes — here’s what’s working for us, here’s where we’re struggling, here’s what we need prayer for. And on the executive side, we’re part of an organization here in Hawaii called Kingdom Collective that pulls all the churches together quarterly, seats people by ministry role, and puts them at a table over lunch. So all the executive pastors — from churches larger and smaller than ours — end up comparing notes on things nobody else finds interesting. Church management software tips. Whether geofencing is a reasonable way to auto-check-in people who walk onto campus with the church app installed. (That’s real, and it’s wild.)
Ultimately we’re all one church with the same goal. The other churches in your city are almost certainly doing several things better than you are. Go ask them.
Verdict: cap as written. Banger as amended.
7. Go Multi-Site — Cap (But It’s a Preference)
Cap, and we’ll be honest that this one is closer to conviction than data.
I’m wired as a church planter. The church I’m part of now was itself a campus of a larger church — we did the multi-site thing, and then we planted this church again as its own, with a handshake rather than a split, still carrying the original name. My belief is that planting is the more biblical model for starting new churches. And I’ve never been sold on video venues.
I also just wonder whether you’re really growing when you go multi-site, versus redistributing. If you have the resources, is it successful at increasing the number of people who could say they go to your church? Probably. Plenty of people do multi-site and do it very well, and this isn’t an argument against them. It’s a preference for the other side of the same coin.
What we’d both add: if you do it, it has to be enormously purposeful. You’d better have someone on staff with real passion to go lead that campus. This is not a thing to do because you read that it works.
The Related Advice That Does Earn a Banger: Multi-Service
Churches usually go multi-service before they go multi-site, and multi-service is solid advice — a low banger.
You’ve probably heard the rule: when you hit 80% capacity, it’s time to add a service. There’s real evidence behind it. We’d push back slightly on the number — part of me thinks you’re better off at 110%, absolutely bursting, so it’s a no-brainer, because going from one service to two is a massive lift on your volunteers, your servants, and your givers. We’re sitting around 85% right now and prayerfully wrestling with it.
The failure mode is stretching the rule. If you’re at 50% of capacity most weeks but you hit 80% on Easter, you are not at 80% capacity. That’s how churches launch a second service they can’t fill and demoralize everybody.
Verdict: multi-site is cap (preference). Multi-service is a low banger for a church that’s genuinely full.
8. Start a Podcast or a YouTube Channel — Banger and Cap, Respectively
These get bundled together constantly and they are not the same thing.
YouTube: banger
YouTube is the most valuable social channel for most organizations right now, and for churches it’s close to a no-brainer — because you’re already doing 95% of the work.
Run the numbers on what your church already spends producing content every week. I personally spend around 15 hours in prayer, study, writing, practice, and delivery for a single sermon. On top of that we have two people running cameras, people setting up the stage, people on sound, people editing clips. All in, something like 20 to 25 hours a week goes into producing video content that already exists.
The only remaining question is whether you’ll do the small amount of logistical work to make it visible. Put the sermons up. Cut them into clips. Put those on Shorts. We’ve watched it work, and it works as church growth advice, not just as content. Here’s the fuller case for a church YouTube channel.
A podcast: cap, for most churches
Putting your sermon audio out as a podcast feed? Sure, do that — it just won’t move the needle much.
Starting an actual produced podcast — two people in a room, weekly, edited — is a different animal, and it’s a beast. This one requires a producer, an editor, and a thumbnail designer. That’s before anybody talks on camera. And the attrition is brutal: the average podcast reportedly ends up with something like four total episodes. If four episodes is where you land, it was a lot of work for nothing.
There are churches doing this well — usually a pastor with genuine on-camera ability, running a companion show that applies Sunday’s message to everyday life, with an audience already built. For that small group it makes sense. For the vast majority of churches, the time and money are better spent elsewhere until you’ve hit a certain critical mass. More on whether your church should podcast at all.
Verdict: banger on YouTube. Cap on producing an original podcast.
9. Put a Coffee Shop in Your Lobby — Cap
This was real advice, given widely, in the 2010s.
I have specific scar tissue here. The church I pastored in Wisconsin from 2013 to 2019 had a coffee shop — not a lobby cart, an actual coffee shop called Redé, on the second floor on State Street in Madison, the main pedestrian drag right outside UW. Great space, great coffee, and a genuinely beautiful mission: it was a missions coffee shop, and all the proceeds funded work in Haiti.
I shut it down in 2014, my first year there.
The fundamental problem was that there were no proceeds. It wasn’t accomplishing its mission of helping anyone in Haiti, and when I opened the books I found our employees were essentially volunteering — which was its own problem. We had to have an honest conversation with the leaders running it, who were wonderful people doing something I loved on paper. The economics just never worked.
Now, the lobby version can work in the right context. One of us went to ministry school at a church with a small shop right inside the lobby, thirty feet from the atrium door, staffable by two people, open every day. And it worked — because there was weekday foot traffic. Students on campus, staff in the building, and an atrium used as an open prayer room most days of the week. People were coming through those doors all week long.
That’s the whole variable. A coffee shop in a building with no weekday foot traffic is a business you’re subsidizing, not a ministry. Count the cost honestly before you build one.
And if the question is whether a coffee shop will grow your church: no. If it’s whether a coffee shop can be a good ministry decision for your specific church — sure, it can be. Those are different questions, and this list is about the first one.
Verdict: cap as growth advice. Fine as a contextual ministry call, with your eyes open.
10. “Just Pray More and Trust God — Strategy Is Worldly” — Cap
We get this comment on nearly every video we make. So let’s take it seriously.
First, we affirm the heart of it completely. It isn’t by our own strength that the church is built; it’s by the grace of God. The Lord’s hand is on who shows up and who stays. Please pray — praying for God to send the right people and for your team to do the best ministry it possibly can will do more than anything else on this list. One of the books that most formed my ministry is Fresh Wind, Fresh Fire by Jim Cymbala of Brooklyn Tabernacle, and the line I keep coming back to is that you can measure the health of a church not by attendance at its Sunday services but by attendance at its prayer meetings. I believe that. It’s foundational to how I lead.
And we understand the concern underneath the comment. You can watch church after church become consumed with numbers, tactics, and the marketing side of things until it’s genuinely toxic. That’s a real failure mode, and it’s worth guarding against.
But “you’re not growing because you’re not praying hard enough” is terrible advice, and we’ve seen too many pastors wounded by it. The version of this that reaches pastors is: you’re not spiritual enough, you don’t worship hard enough, you don’t preach well enough, you don’t pray enough — focus harder on God and He’ll grow your church. That is not how it works, and as a primary diagnosis it leads mostly to brokenheartedness and a lot of counseling down the road. In most cases it comes from people who’ve never carried church leadership themselves.
The better frame is stewardship. In the parable of the talents, the master rebukes the servant who buried what he was given. God has handed you a church to steward, and your job is to steward it well — not to bury it and pray over the spot where you buried it.
It’s the same as any other kind of growth. If your marriage or your emotional health is struggling, yes, pray and contend for it — and also go to counseling, and be purposeful, and do the work. We think the Lord designed it that way, and that it’s beautiful that He did. Having a strategy, a plan, real communication with your team, and a serious desire to reach the people in your community is not worldly. It’s stewardship.
Verdict: cap. Pray hard and plan well. The two were never in competition.
The Pattern Underneath All Ten
Look at what got capped and a theme shows up.
Almost every piece of bad advice on this list is bad for the same reason: it takes something that worked in one church’s specific context and sells it as a mechanism. The coffee shop worked at a church with weekday foot traffic. The attractional model worked in a media environment that no longer exists. Copying the fastest-growing church in town works right up until the moment their context stops matching yours.
And almost every piece of good advice on this list is slow. Kids ministry pays off in twenty years. Small groups build people before they build numbers. YouTube compounds. Relationships with other pastors take years to become the thing you actually lean on.
The advice that promises a mechanism is usually the advice to be suspicious of. The advice that asks for patience is usually the one worth taking.
Your Next Step
If you want outside eyes on which of these your church should actually be investing in, start with a free church marketing and website review. Our team will look at your digital front door, your communications, and your overall church presence, and 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.
