The Three Growth Pathways Every Church Needs

At Clearpath, helping churches reach their city for Christ is what we’re all about. To help make that happen, we come alongside churches to create powerful marketing and communications platforms and systems. We do things like walk churches through rebranding campaigns to help reach their target audience, create websites to help potential visitors take their first step, and build church management systems to help connect visitors with people and ministries. 

And while all of this is important for church growth, failing to first create a cohesive strategy can render all of that useless.

This is why before we build anything, I encourage churches to first create three essential strategies; which I call the Church Growth Pathways.

Church Growth Pathways are what we call the step-by-step strategies churches use to help do three things: 1) attract new visitors, 2) help those visitors connect with people and ministries, 3) and eventually get those people invested long-term in the church through membership (or membership equivalent).

So in this short article, I want to briefly explain each of these three pathways as well as some important guiding principles for their creation. But before I do, I want to stress that none of these pathways are substitutes of outreach, evangelism, or discipleship. In fact, all three of these should be infused into your church growth pathways in a way that best fits your church's culture..

Visitor Pathway

The Visitor Pathway is the strategy the church has in place to help attract new visitors. This pathway is marked by getting crystal clear about your target audience and then utilizing a combination of marketing strategies and platforms to reach them. 

The first step is to identify who you can/should be reaching. No church can reach everyone, period.
Small to midsize churches may not have all the Sunday morning bells and whistles large churches do, but they do have something incredible to offer to the right audience. Many people are looking for a more intimate and relational church family. So figure out your target audience and focus your resources on reaching them.

Once you’ve identified your target audience, now you’re ready to create marketing systems and platforms to reach them. Are you trying to reach boomers in a rural area? Then you probably don’t want to sink tons of time and money into marketing toward Gen Z on Tik Tok. Instead, you may want to rely more on personal invitation resources and in-person social gatherings. You can learn about how people found your church through formal surveys or casual welcome table conversations and then capitalize on those methods.

Your Visitor Pathway is understandably a little theoretical and people will find your church through other pathways. But the goal of a visitor pathway is to be intentional with reaching new visitors and for what comes next in the Connecting Pathway. 

Connecting Pathway

If the Visitor Pathway is how you get people in the door (so to speak), then the Connecting Pathway is what takes over once they’re through it. The goal of the Connecting Pathway is to help turn someone from a visitor into a connected attender. 

This pathway will require different strategies and systems. For instance, your Visitor Pathway will probably utilize your website, social media, and some paid and/or organic marketing. Your Connecting Pathway will instead likely use a combination of your church management system, a welcome team, and maybe a connecting form for serving, joining a group/ministry, or attending a welcome gathering. 

It can feel overwhelming to decide on a Connecting Pathway because there seems like a million things you can/should do to help people connect. I’d encourage you to not overdo it. Think of a connecting Pathway that utilizes both automations in your systems (like sign-ups with automatic emails and workflows) and authentic relational connections. Create connecting opportunities that can be offered regularly and help people take their first step.

Membership Pathway

Once a church has attracted a new visitor and helped them connect, many church churches stop there. However, I argue there’s one more critical pathway to create and that’s the Membership Pathway.

The concept of church membership is, for some churches, a bit outdated. If you don’t have membership, that’s okay. Instead, think of this as the pathway toward helping people who are connected attenders become people who are committed to the life, mission, and culture of your church. They don’t just attend your church, they are your church.

One of the key reasons why a Membership Pathways is so important is, people who attend your church because of the ministries you offer can just as easily leave your church for another if circumstances change. But when a person or family is committed to the church through membership, discipleship, and deep relationships, circumstances will rarely affect their commitment. 

Therefore, I encourage churches to note where the Connecting Pathway left off and to think and pray about what the next step should be. Should you create a monthly membership orientation? Should you create a discipleship pathway that intentionally invites all attendees into a deeper learning group? 

Regardless of your pathway, I encourage churches to utilize church management systems on a deeper level to track their attendee pathways and and intentionally help people move from simply attending a ministry or service, to serving in that ministry, leading a ministry, and empowering them to participate in the ongoing mission and vision of the church.

5 Guiding Principles

As you think about your three Church Growth Pathways, I would encourage you to remember the following five guiding principles. Make sure your pathways are prayerful + strategic + authentic + realistic + flexible.

Prayerful: Before you get ahead of yourself, make sure you bathe the entire Church Growth Pathway creation process in prayer. Don’t forget, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labor in vain.” (Psalm 127:1) 

Strategic: Be thoughtful about each step of your three Pathways. Don’t make the mistake of thinking “strategic” means something isn’t Spirit led. 

Authentic: Make sure your Pathways aren’t just copies of another church’s Pathways. Create something that is true to your church’s culture.

Realistic: It’s important to dream big, make sure your Pathways are realistic in regard to what your church can achieve within its time and resources. This means don’t create Pathways that require 10 full-time staff when you only have 3. 

Flexible: Despite careful planning and strategizing, sometimes things won’t work how you plan them. Take a page out of the business playbook and see failure as a learning opportunity to adjust and improve. So in a word, be flexible.

Now You’re Ready

Once you’ve created your Church Growth Pathways, you’ll be ready to create the platforms and systems you need to reach people; except now, you have clear strategies in place to rebrand to an intentional target audience, build a website that helps people take their first step toward visiting, and a Church Management System that drive churches leaders to get people connected and stay connected.

If you’d like to know more about creating your own Church Growth Pathway, Clearpath offers an 8-week, one-on-one consulting partnership to help you do just that. We also offer the this partnership as a Cohort, so make sure you subscribe so you’re notified that next time we host one!

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