Your guests are experiencing your church like a lazy river — not like a backyard pool. And believe it or not, the difference will make or break their experience.

This is THE most important message I could have posted this year. In this this short 6-minute video, I share 4 reasons why churches in our culture need a church-wide strategy for connecting guests. I guarantee that some of these you have not considered and your leadership hasn't either.

I've never heard of a downhill climb. Yet many times when spiritual leaders don't see the results they are praying for, the disappointment colors everything: their time with God, their home life, their joy. So I am going to take some time to encourage you right now with the example of some extraordinary men:

When you are not seeing the results that you want to see, that is your cue to return to the leadership style of a Sherpa. 

If the definition of insanity is to do the same things over and over again but expect different results, then it follows that sanity would be to start doing more of the things that give us the results we want. 

That's what we started doing in 2016 in our assimilation ministry at Eastside. It was a bold move.

Your Yelp app is pointing to a new reality in how guests at your church make decisions about where they are willing to spend their time and why. So here's what I'm learning about promoting our assimilation environments…

I have learned something about entertaining in my home: people don't always sit where you want them to. But when I dragged 2 $17 chairs to the edge of the lawn, my guests started to bee-line for the best view in the house—the one they would consistently forfeit before.

That’s when I learned that the key to changing behavior is actually changing your environment—and I see 2 principles we need to keep in mind when it comes to the guests of our church.

Really?! Wine tasting?

Yep. My wife and I love to go wine tasting, especially up the Central Coast of California not far from where we live. The best part? You don't have to buy a single bottle. This is how a lot of people select and enjoy wine today. It's also how many people select and enjoy churches.

My 30th wedding anniversary was last year. I know I don't look old enough to have done anything for 30 years (just roll with it), but this milestone snuck up on me.

Our dinner out to celebrate taught me something that blew my mind, something that our teams should try to give guests whenever possible.

There is an episode of "Friends" where Monica and Phoebe are desperately trying to recreate Phoebe's grandmother's cookie recipe. It is beyond words. 

This scene from America's favorite friends shows us that sometimes the most elegant and powerful realities boil down to a simple recipe.

A process is a set of interrelated activities that interact to achieve a result.

In this post I want to reveal a volunteer placement process from the pages of the New Testament and to share the 2 factors exposed there that must be present if a process is going to be healthy.

Processes in ministry—not something we naturally enjoy thinking about. We would rather take them for granted, but that's exactly what a good process does. A good process becomes something you can take for granted. Processes are essential to the health of any church and they are the spine of any assimilation ministry.

Assimilation means a lot of things to a lot of people—but I’ve learned to narrow it down to the bare essentials. We have to start breaking down each part of a guest’s journey and what it means in a specific and measurable way for them and for us.

Nelson Searcy in his book Fusion shares that on average, churches of any size in the U.S. only assimilate 1 out of every 20 people who visit. Ponder this stat as you think about building community in your church family. It means that 19 out of every 20 people that visit our churches will not become a part of it in any meaningful way. How many people would attempt a journey if only 1 out of 20 would arrive at their destination?

When our movement was born, Christ followers experienced the expansion of community differently: I call it "The 2:47 Factor".