The Importance of Tracking Attendance
By Bill Newman

As I came down the aisle in the grocery store, I spotted a vaguely familiar face up ahead and started searching my memory for some sort of recollection. Then it hit me. It was Jim, the new guy at church who had started attending about six months ago. I also noted that I hadn’t seen Jim in church last week. As I boldly approached, I held out my hand and said, “Jim, how are you? Hey, I missed you in church this week. Is everything okay?” Jim replied with disgust, “I haven’t gone to your church in about five months, and no one ever bothered to notice. Frankly, I’m done with church. I don’t think anyone there really cares about me, if you want to know the truth.” I stood in stunned silence as Jim walked away. 

How many other “Jims” had “fallen through the cracks” at our church? Surely, I thought, there must be a way to keep people like Jim from getting hurt in this way. What is the answer? Years later, I have found it to be detailed attendance tracking.

Gone are the days of the little brown plaque in the front of the sanctuary that showed how many people were at last week’s services. “Cattle call” attendance, as I like to refer to it, has practically no value at all in our culture today, except to the church that cares little about its people and only about its size and numbers. 

Simply put, it doesn’t matter how many attended your service; what does matter is who attended your service. Only when you know who will you then be able to find out the answers to the questions of why, when, how, and what. As a growing, caring ministry, we should be striving to know the answers to these questions:

* Why did they or did they not attend?
* When do they come to church?
* How did they hear about us and how are they involved?
* What is going on in their lives and what can we be doing to minister more effectively to them?

Your ability to answer these important questions will drastically impact the stewardship of your ministry, and you will be light years ahead in being able to answer these questions if you are taking detailed attendance at your church. Yes, I said detailed attendance, meaning keeping a detailed record of each person’s attendance at each worship service, Sunday school class, or event at your church. 

I recently spoke with Rev. Lauren Vanacore from Memorial Presbyterian Church in North Carolina who said, “Taking detailed attendance is so important to us so that our elders can know how to properly respond to people who have missed worship services because of unknown needs.”

One of the biggest hindrances to taking detailed attendance is that many church administrators would much more cheerfully spend the day getting multiple root canals or frolicking barefoot in a briar patch than trying to enter detailed attendance into their record-keeping system. However, when they see how easily a proper system can help them enter attendance, they really do begin to get excited about the possibilities of being able to track information at this level.

Another huge hindrance to taking detailed attendance is that many churchgoers don’t want anyone looking over their shoulders playing the part of “big brother” and making sure they are going to church each week. So, if you are going to pull this off, you can’t act like the “granny patrol,” chiding people whenever they skip church to play golf. That isn’t the point. The point is showing your care and concern for people in order to effectively minister to them.

So, how in the world are you going to take this detailed attendance? Well, it should be clear that you will need to get a software system in place on your computer that will allow you to track the information in an efficient, accurate, and user-friendly manner. 

Your system should produce rosters that can quickly and easily be printed or e-mailed to your staff and teachers. The software should also allow for various methods of data entry that will be suitable for your staff and needs. These methods can include bar-code entry, manual entry, simple name look-ups, and the ability to enter visitors in the system on the fly. You will also want time savers like being able to attend whole groups or families at a time and have the ability to attend anyone who contributed that day. You should also be able to easily pull up and mark attendance for any event, class, or service and have your system automatically know who is enrolled for that event.

Once you have the attendance entered into your system, you need to make sure it will do two important things. First, it should produce reports that are valuable to you. Second, it should allow you to merge the attendance data into personalized letters, postcards, and other follow-up mechanisms.

The great thing is that you will be able to do powerful things in very little time, such as pull up a list of active members who were absent three weeks in a row last month or visitors who came twice last month. If you are using a good system, you will be able to instantly send out personalized mail-merged letters to those individuals or e-mail the list to your staff members who handle follow up. Thus, you will make sure your “Jims” aren’t “falling through the cracks.”

Regardless of how you go about doing it, the key will be “selling” the vision to people, and this is usually something that needs to be done from the pastoral or ministerial level. After all, none of this will work if your people are determined not to let you know when they are at the church.  You will need to convince those people that you need their help so that your church can effectively minister to the people who are sitting in the pews or chairs around them.

So, stop counting heads and starting taking note of who and not just how many. I’m convinced that you will see your ministry grow, as people see that they are cared for in a meaningful way.   You will also know that you are a great steward of the opportunities to minister to people that come your way each week, and you will be rewarded as people stop “falling through the cracks” at your church.

Bill Newman is the general manager at Servant PC Resources Inc., makers of Servant Keeper, www.servantpc.com.