Tipton Family Church

...the growing church!

 

From October 2007 we began to walk the path of church growth. Like many churches, we had been stable in our numbers over many years. We added the odd person here, lost the odd one there, and although we had an active church, we weren't increasing numerically. When Stewart stood up to preach on the Sunday morning of October 7 and announced that the next four month's sermons were all going to be church growth related, it was with a word of conviction that he also announced that we were setting the target of 100% growth by the end of 2008!

For a church that numerically was very small indeed, that statement no doubt raised eyebrows! But the great thing is that if God is in something, then when we walk in obedience, he will bring it to pass. And we didn't have to wait long either. Immediately we went from being a church that never had visitors on a Sunday morning to one that has new faces on a very regular basis.

There are many ways of measuring growth, all have pluses yet all have shortcomings too. The way that we have decided to measure our progress is by Sunday service attendance. Church growth is not ultimately about figures and statistics, it is about people. But by setting goals and strategising towards their fulfillment we are able to remain focused and also to monitor progress. And by publishing the results, it keeps us motivated too!

We took October 2007 as our baseline and so the statistics kick in from November. The December figure is particularly high due to the packed meeting we had at the carol service! Then it was back to 'normal', but we still continued seeing growth in 2008. In fact, we started to grow from week one in October, so if took that as a figure, we actually passed the 100% figure in March 2008! But we didn't have long to wait as a month later in April our growth reached 111%.