I often refer to NCC as a revolving door church. What I mean by that is this: our turnover rate is approximately 30-40% per year. It used to be 50% per year! We had a brand new church every two years!
Half of that is due to demographics. We're 73% single twenty-somethings who are at a very transient stage of life. The other half of it is due to geographics. DC is the intern capital of the world. It's not uncommon to have someone attend NCC for a three-month internship.
That used to drive us crazy, but we've really embraced that as part of our unique calling. We're a revolving door church.
On one hand it means we have to grow approximately 30-40% just to break even from year-to-year. But it has also been our saving grace. It's very difficult to plant and grow a church in a city that doesn't have population growth or new housing developments. We've been able to build a church in DC because so many people walk through the revolving door all the time. And it's primarily twenty-somethings.
Revolving doors can make you dizzy! But it is part of our calling as a church.
Half of that is due to demographics. We're 73% single twenty-somethings who are at a very transient stage of life. The other half of it is due to geographics. DC is the intern capital of the world. It's not uncommon to have someone attend NCC for a three-month internship.
That used to drive us crazy, but we've really embraced that as part of our unique calling. We're a revolving door church.
On one hand it means we have to grow approximately 30-40% just to break even from year-to-year. But it has also been our saving grace. It's very difficult to plant and grow a church in a city that doesn't have population growth or new housing developments. We've been able to build a church in DC because so many people walk through the revolving door all the time. And it's primarily twenty-somethings.
Revolving doors can make you dizzy! But it is part of our calling as a church.
6 Comments:
Man. Talk about a pastor who lives by faith. Who turns their church over ever 2 years?! A-mazing.
What a great opportunity to engage people and build into them for a while and them release them to carry the love, vision and movement of Christ all over the country and world.
The revolving door nature of the church makes things like the evotional and podcasts all the more important.
It's really a blessing to be able to read the evotionals and listen to the godcasts when I'm out of town.
Another great thing about this is that you can affect so many areas of the country with your ministry.
If you had homegroup leadership training or something like that in which you funneled these "transients" into you would in effect be a major church planting ministry. These people would leave and in turn begin ministries all over the country.
Though you have great challanges, the opportunities are endless!
I have mainly pastored in the mid-west but now live and serve as a childrens pastor in Fairfax, VA. Seeing that we are only about a 20 minute drive from you we struggle with this same challenge.
I would love to continue hearing from you on how you handle this with not only ministering to the people but how you help them plug into ministry knowing they may be there for a short time. This has been a challenge for me. Building teams.
We really try to get people plugged in quickly :)
We operate on a semester system for small groups and ministries and we've found that gives us lots of entry points.
And exit points :)
We also tell people to plug in even if they are only around for one semester.
Carpe Diem.
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