Growing Your Church Through Evangelism and Outreach

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We call not to get people to come back to church; we call because people are in pain.
—John Savage

I was sorting slides I had used in an every-member canvass in my church. When I held some to the window, I was shocked. Pictured in the first three slides were three couples who had held key offices in the church my first year there. Now, four years later, those couples were totally inactive.

These people no longer attended worship, except maybe on Christmas or Easter, made no financial contribution, didn't participate in the life of the church, and had a negative attitude about the congregation.

How could people move in just four years from active involvement to total inactivity? I wondered.

I thought of times I had visited inactive members and seen absolutely nothing happen. In fact, often they were more convinced to stay away after I made the call. I knew I needed to figure out how to keep current members active and enable inactive ones to return.

I went to work on these questions as I pursued a doctorate and have continued to search for answers during the past decade.

I tried to find studies about the phenomenon, but I dug up nothing. So, with a psychologist and a theologian, I designed a research project. Thirteen trained pastors and I interviewed inactive members from four United Methodist congregations to find out what caused them to disappear from church life.

We found 95 percent of the people had experienced what we now call an "anxiety-provoking event"—an APE. Subsequent research showed these events usually come in clusters, several APEs compounding within six months to a year.

Anxiety is the emotional alarm system triggered when we're in disequilibrium, when we've been hurt or feel that unless a change ...

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