We’ve got a very big promotion coming up at Gateway Church. Very Big. Actually it’s so big that we’re going to host four parent meetings to explain all that is happening. To be honest, we don’t really need the parent meetings, but its another opportunity for me to speak vision to our parents, so we’re going to anyway.
- Currently we have four nursery rooms that are almost at capacity every weekend.
- Our preschool is overflowing. We have 20-25 kids in our Clubhouse (large group teaching area) and over 40 four and five year olds in our Cottage room.
- We have Kindergarten-5th grade split between two rooms.
- We offer Middle School only during our 12:30 service.
Our 9:30 and 11:00 services see similar sized crowds, but our 12:30 service has a fraction of the participants.
So, on August 24th, were making some big changes.
- We’re bringing in two portable buildings (yeah, they’re trailers) which will give us 4 more rooms.
- The kids in the clubhouse will move out to the portables
- The 40 kids in the cottage (who would be promoting kindergarten) will move to the portables.
- We’re launching a significant small group component to our 1st-5th grade rooms.
- We’ll be offering middle school during all the services (we’re giving them the cottage room)
It’s big changes for us, but we’re really excited. We’ve got a lot of fresh faces to recruit. It isn’t really any more kids (well, maybe some), it’s just more rooms and opportunities to serve. I’ll be keeping this blog up to date on our promotion efforts.
Your attendance and promotion sounds exciting, but I have to ask you a question. Why study the numbers in attendance? Is that where our success should focus on … see a great post on a new way of thinking of missional ministry success … http://www.wdavidphillips.com/2008/06/05/measuring-success-in-ministry/
Just a thought.
Hi Brenna, I know the year I worked in CM before coming home to be with my son, we did study attendance numbers somewhat. Not so much to record success, but to help plan for rooms and ratios. It gave us an idea of who was promoting so we could plan our rooms accordingly. I literally had a room of 2’s busting at the seams. The preschool director was really glad to know that as she reorganized her rooms and recruited more workers to accommodate those kids as they moved to her 3 year old class.
This post wasn’t intended to be about numbers at all, but just and update to those who’ve been following my transition to Gateway Church and all the changes coming up in the fall… we’re doing a pretty big apple turnover on August 24th.
The link you provided was EXCELLENT! I agree 100% with that list as a way to measure success. However, I’m always cautious when people want to throw out tracking numbers as a measure of success. Yes, kids are people, not numbers. But, each number represents a soul. As Craig Jutila used to say, it doesn’t matter if you have 50 kids or 500 kids, the only number that matters is if you’re influencing MORE than you did the year before. In addition, Jim Wideman talked about how vital it was to be able to track kids as their pastor. The Shepherd counted his sheep and knew when the 1 was missing. When you’re responsible for 30-40 separate classes/rooms on a weekend, tracking the numbers helps me as a leader/manager/pastor. When a room takes a dip, is there something going on that I need to know about. When one room begins to soar, I can plan new spaces to accommodate growth. Yeah, I’ll have to disagree with you on this one, knowing the numbers is key to what I do.