Information about creating/organizing new member classes.
This past Saturday at the Immanuel Baptist Church in Lexington, Kentucky, the Kentucky Baptist Convention offered a variety of great training opportunities. If you missed the event, similar training is being offered at five other locations across the state. One of the discipleship faculty was Tim Holcomb, Director of Discipleship…
Recent studies by Dr. Chuck Lawless and Dr. Gary L. McIntosh indicate that more and more churches are utilizing new member classes. Although some require the class for membership (31% according to Lawless), the majority do not. Regardless of whether the class is required for membership or not, it can…
When Dr. Tom Rainer served as Dean of the Billy Graham School at Southern Seminary in Louisville, he ran a consulting company that helped churches across America. In his consultations, he discovered that the overwhelming majority of the churches needed marked improvement in the area of assimilation. As a result,…
The last few days, Nelson Searcy has been answering assimilation questions on his blog, Church Leader Insights. These posts are a MUST READ if you are seeking to improve in the area of assimilation. Searcy’s posts include answers to the following questions: What do you say to get people to…
This Thursday, May 22, Dr. Gary McIntosh will be with us at the Kentucky Baptist Convention building. He will talk about assimilation principles taken from his book, Beyond the First Visit, along with other books he has written. Check out the well-written Western Recorder article on this upcoming event. Dr.…
Today, as I continue discussing Nelson Searcy’s book Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church, I will look at the seven-minute, pre-service period when first-time guests decide if they will return for a second visit. Searcy refers to this time as the time “from the street to the seat.” This is…
Today, we continue talking about Nelson Searcy’s book Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church. Searcy titled chapter 3, Seven Minutes and Counting. In the chapter, he talked the importance of what happens to first-time guests during the first seven minutes of their visit. He wrote, Seven minutes…
Let’s continue to look at Nelson Searcy’s rockin’ assimilation book, Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church. Today, we will look at God’s assimilation plan discussed in chapter 2. But before we get into our discussion, let me point you to the comments section of Part 1…
This week I am going to be discussing Nelson Searcy’s excellent new assimilation book entitled, Fusion: Turning First-Time Guests into Fully-Engaged Members of Your Church. Searcy is the founding pastor of Journey Church in New York City and formerly served as the founding director of the Purpose Driven Community with…
Recently, I sat down in the studio with Joe Ball, Kentucky Baptist Convention Youth Strategist, to discuss discipleship and assimilation. We focused on those topics especially as they relate to students. You can listen to our conversation on his blog, Despising None. During our conversation about mentoring students, I pointed…
Two encounters are critical. First, the leader encounters God in His Word and is changed. Second, the leader guides the group to have a life-changing encounter.