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In the future, most pastors will use the building to reach people online.
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Today, most pastors use church online to get people into the building. In the future church, the way church leaders think about buildings and online might flip. In a digital world, facilities will still play a role, but perhaps they’ll play a different role. You’ll Use the Building to Reach People Online, Not Use Online to Get People in the Building.įor centuries, church facilities have existed to assemble people.Īnd in a pre-digital world, that made a lot of sense. If you expand your definition of gathering, it’s much easier to genuinely expand your mission. But what if there are still far more people engaged who aren’t in the room? Or even imagine packing out your auditorium. I completely empathize with the frustrations of empty seats and not having “everyone” together, but if you can begin to expand your definition of “together,” you can realize a much deeper sense of mission. What if in the future, most of the people engaging with your mission won’t be in the building and not just be “away?” What if instead, most of the people engaged with your mission will watching online, watching on demand, attending micro-gatherings or engaged in other ways? If you have an attendance of 150, you probably have 300 or more people who are actively engaged in your mission. If you think about it, for years now, the people in the building on any given Sunday have been a minority of those who call your church home. In-Person Attendance in the Building Will Be a Percentage of Your Real Church. In the same way workplaces are embracing permanent distributed teams, a distributed church that’s centrally connected to joint leadership and mission could be a massive step forward for most churches. This could become an advance.įrom Outreach Magazine A Stranger's Gift, a Child's Faith
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Many home-based churches to date are a retreat from the organized church. And in the future church, there will also be some who want to gather elsewhere.īefore you think “house church,” realize that this model could provide a lot more growth than most North American house church models ever did. There will always be people who want to gather in a central facility. When church leaders realize that this isn’t a threat, but possibly an advance of the mission, the mission could move forward at greater scale and speed than in a model where everyone had to gather in one central facility. Younger generations are deeply social, and forward thinking churches might look to capitalize on facilitating home gatherings, community gatherings and other micro-gatherings that pull people together for in-person experiences. With 71% of Boomers desiring primarily a physical church experience and only 41% of Gen Z desiring a primarily physical experience of church, some kind of change seems inevitable. With some of the shift home for work, school, shopping, dining, entertainment and fitness is temporary, a proportion of it will likely be permanent in the post-COVID era. While that sounds threatening, it isn’t nearly as threatening as it seems. One of the big shifts that the disruption is ushering in is that in-person doesn’t necessarily mean in your facility. In the future, we may just gather differently.įor centuries, the gathering of the church has happened in a facility, and as leaders, we’ve become both accustomed to that and a bit addicted to that way of gathering. In Person Doesn’t Necessarily Mean in Your Facility. So, how will physical attendance change in the future? No one can see the future perfectly, and I may be wrong on some of this, but based on what I’m seeing, here are five ways physical church attendance will change in the next few years.