One recent Sunday, my wife and I decided not to attend live, on-site church. A crisis in our family had taken place 200 miles away and had involved a six-day trip. We were worn out and needed a day to decompress physically, emotionally and spiritually.
So we attended church online. Our church has three worship services. We watched the one that takes place during the hour we are usually in Sunday School. We then watched the service of the church we had attended for more than 30 years before my retirement last year.
I also wrote a prayer about our family crisis. Besides sending it to family members, I sent it to our Sunday School class and the three ministers from our church who had been in contact with us.
We did not attend church on-site, but we were engaged in church and were an active part of God’s Church that day.
Transition
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I was the director of a Baptist association of 100 churches. A key issue was counting church participation. I suggested our churches move from counting attendance to counting engagement.
This did not fit some churches’ convictions about participation. For others, it was a relief and an innovation to think about engagement as another way of counting attendance.
Counting engagement is a reframing of participation. It acknowledges that church engagement exists through both live presence and online presence. But in our Baptist tradition of counting attendance only through live presence, we have not changed our counting pattern.
Now is the time.
Once we counted active members as people who attended every Sunday, those who when not present brought us a bulletin from the church they attended. Then we lowered the definition of active members to those who attended three Sundays each month — and then two. Some churches finally arrived at a place that any person who attended at least one Sunday each month was considered active.
When the pandemic forced churches to have an in-person attendance of zero, we panicked. As online worship started for the tens of thousands of Baptist churches who were not online before, they did not know how to count attendance.
Questions arose like how do we know if they are really engaged in worship or whether they’ve just clicked into the online service, but are actually doing something else? That sounds like the person on the third row on the left side who never sings and sleeps through every sermon — present but not participating.
Other pastors said, “I am a televangelist now. I preach to masses of people from three continents.”
One church with a high percentage of empty nesters and senior adult households asked me to help them think through counting and how to engage people online. They felt they had lost participation. They had not.
They were averaging about 175 in live attendance. We asked the staff — who likely knew the most about those not present on-site — to suggest people who were engaged weekly but not present on-site. They came up with more than 150 additional people on average who had some type of specific weekly engagement with the church.
If they only counted attendance, they were one size. If they counted engagement, they were another size. Their engagement number was their real participation.
Andy Anderson got it right
Do you go back far enough to remember Andy Anderson and the Sunday School Growth Spiral program? I do. A key part of it was that every person attending a church was assigned to a Sunday School class, even if they had not joined and were not attending Sunday School.
Anderson knew if people were not on someone’s list, they would soon no longer be attending or engaging.
Every person online for whom you have a name and contact information needs to be on someone’s list. They are engaged. Someone needs to proactively care about them.
Everyone is a person of worth created in the image of God to live and to love. Someone needs to care about their spiritual pilgrimage and their connection with a congregation of Christ followers.
Let’s engage people
What can your churches in association do to help one another learn ways to count people who are engaged, minister to them, help them grow as disciples and involve them in the life of a congregation of Christ-followers?
