Vision 2008 Part 1

Last weekend I gave our vision 2008 message where I laid out where we are going over the next year. I love being able to do that. I need to do it more. We all lose sight of the big picture at times and we never really get past what we are doing in the here and now. Over the next couple of days and blogs I am going to sum up the stuff we talked about last week. We started off by talking about church planting stats and how we are doing compared to other church plants. Our stats were provided by the North American Mission Board which is the worlds largest church planting organization and has the most information on and about church planting anywhere.

Some Stats.

• The average church plant in America has less than 100 people it's four year mark.
• Real Life had an average attendance in it's first year of 38 people.
• The average church plant in America is just becoming financially self supporting at the four year mark.
• Real Life has been financially self supporting since day one.
• The average church plant in America has a 50% turnover in membership it's first year. (seems high but remember church planting is hard work. Often church plants are portable adding to the work load, church plants attract people that have issues in other churches and they bring those issues to you, and people can be spiritually mismatched in a plant getting wrapped up in wanting to shape the plant after their tastes, and a host of other reasons.)
• Real Life has lost two families. Why so low? Primarily, because we take extra efforts to plug people in and connect with them relationally. In fact, April and I make it a practice to have dinner with each new family shortly after they visit our church.
  

What is our vision with respect to attendance?

• We are going to triple in size in 2008.
• How will we do that? We are going to continue doing what we are doing. Additionally, we are going to do radio ads, direct mail, fliers, and inviting quite a bit this year. We are going to look at really connecting with people our our new neighborhood. We are going to create an atmosphere that is so fun people will want to invite.