Church Community & New People
[by Tim Macbride, 14/01/2005]



A constant challenge faced by our church community is to integrate the steady stream of new people into the life of our church. It’s one thing to offer a smiling face and a cup of coffee on the first visit – or even the second – but most people who are searching for a church home are looking to build significant relationships. Yet it’s a difficult and daunting process, and is often why people leave the church after a few weeks or even many months, not having made those meaningful connections that are vital to being part of our wider community.

If you look at our church’s vital statistics (see sidebar), on any given Sunday around one in every thirteen people you see will have been attending for less than six months. As well, around one in six will probably be finding it difficult to fit in, if attendance patterns are any guide. Then of course there is the one in every hundred who is visiting for the first time. What can be done to cater for such a large number of people looking to build friendships?

Home groups are one of the main ways people form relationships in a large church, and time after time I see the difference it makes when people make the effort to join a group soon after turning up to our church. Our home group, as just one example, began at the start of last year with just a few ‘well-connected’ people and a vision to grow a group from those new to our church and who hadn’t been in a group before. It has been great to see genuine friendships form, and the group spontaneously care for one another through difficult times.

A similar process has happened this year amongst 1824, whose leadership team took a risk in starting the year with one more group than was really required. Through this, we have seen people join who weren’t in a home group before, and stay – I think partly because they felt they were needed for the group to function. What is even more exciting is seeing some of these people now putting their hand up for ministry roles as we recruit for teams in 2005! Our vision is that during 40 days of purpose next year we see the remaining 25% of young adults join a group, experience a genuine sense of belonging to God’s people, and then get involved in ministry.

Home groups aren’t the answer for every new person, however. Sometimes they are simply unable to join a group – at least when first attending our church. In this case forming significant relationships with others in the church is even more important. The problem is, many of the existing people in the church already have as many friends as they can reasonably keep up with. As one church growth expert puts it: people are like lego pieces, in that they have a limited number of connections they can maintain – around eight. When someone’s lego is ‘filled up’, they find it hard to incorporate new relationships, not out of a lack of desire but simply a lack of time.

The solution to this – and I’ve seen it happen many times over the past 15 years I’ve been at this church – is for new people to make friends with newer people. (I’ve likened it to the formation of geological stratas, but no-one ever gets the analogy…) There are still friendship networks in our church that exist largely between people who turned up in roughly the same ‘era’. I see it happening now, with people who came a year ago being instrumental in befriending those who turned up last month.


Related Link: Narwee Baptist Church