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Breaking barriers

Yesterday Dane and I listened on CD to the first hour of Nelson Searcy's Breaking Growth Barriers workshop.

One of the first growth barriers a church will face is space.  At some point your facility begins to feel full even when it isn't full.  Searcy uses the "70% rule": when you are filling 70% of your seats your are full.  Technically, the space isn't full, but people perceive that it is.

When this happens people
• stop inviting guests
• stop talking/connecting to others
• attend erratically

At GBCK we are facing this barrier in our 10am service.  We are hovering right at 70% capacity.  In order to create more space we will shift our service start times a half-hour later to 9am and 10:30am in order to give people more options to attend and to invite.  The change happens on May 16.

I believe GBCK is poised to reach our next growth increment of 300, which means the Gospel is growing and bearing fruit (Col. 1:6) and that disciples are being made (Matt. 28:19).

As we heard on the CD, sometimes all it takes is one little tweak to bust through a growth barrier.