How has The City Helped You Connect Newcomers? [excerpt]

Brad House, Mars Hill Church (Seattle); Shawn Wood (Seacoast Church, SC)

Brad House, Community Pastor from Mars Hill Church, and Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor from Seacoast, share how The City helps their churches develop a consistent assimilation process across their multiple campuses.

“We’re seeing a rhythm of what’s happening with people being followed up on and know they’ve been followed up with.” ~ Shawn Wood, Experiences Pastor, Seacoast

Conversation Transcript:

Eric:  How has The City helped with the assimilation process in your church?

Shawn:  For us that’s been one of the biggest areas that we have seen is we are now on a unified assimilation process. We found that with 13 campuses and I think even for a single site church it would be the case with different ministries. We just had every kind of different assimilation process going on from people who were tracking things on Google Docs to people who were tracking things over in our other database management to some people who weren’t tracking anything at all to follow up on people.

So we had this wide thing, spectrum of follow up and assimilation. So for one it just made us have a shared vision of what we were going to do. So we had to talk through it and again going back to the why. Why are we going to do this? What are we going do? And getting to the final how and then I think the same as with data it’s been a different paradigm, a different way of looking at it because it’s now all web based follow up. We’re seeing a rhythm of what’s happening with people being followed up on and know they’ve been followed up with. Whether they communicate back or not is still up to them.

But when we used to send out a snail mail letter, we didn’t have that next step where they could communicate back. So we’re starting to see people really feel good about that and our campus pastors and our campus teams are really starting to embrace that. So that’s been a big deal for us with the assimilation.

Then just quickly talk about we took our membership process into The City. Now as a next step of follow up, we get you connected and now you want to come to a newcomer, you come to an actual newcomer’s reception, a live physical reception and that’s what we started when the church was planted that’s what we did. It was a real community time and getting to know people.

Well over the years that developed into this class basically to become a member. Now we pulled that class video based onto The City and again it has given us another shared way that we know how that is happening. And so if you go through these steps, this process at The City is how you become a member and you have to go through that process.

So now we know there are not some campuses that go oh you want to be a member? Sure sign here and then others making an 8 week long class go on. But we have a shared I think it’s actually 8 weeks now or 8 sessions of a course that you have to go through.

Brad:  Did I hear you right; you used to send out a letter?

Shawn: Yes stamps and everything.

Brad:  Mars Hills is too young for that, we never did mail. I think for assimilation you’re hitting it on the head, which is you have a consistent platform for doing assimilation. It allows us to manage process independent, which is what you’re talking about with the member process and you can build your own processes that you need for membership or for leadership development. We use it for a lot of different processes that we used to basically have to keep track on a piece of paper or in Google Docs or something.

So it puts it all in one spot. So right now I can honestly say if there is a problem on the assimilation level it is usually with the response from the person we’re trying to connect with and not from our internal process, which a couple of years ago I couldn’t have said that.

Shawn:  So when The City invents a way to make people actually respond back then bonus.

Eric:  That brings up all sorts of theological issues we’re not going to touch on today.