As some of you may or may not know our nephew was involved in a serious accident over a month ago and as a result, we’ve been out of state, visiting him and his family almost every weekend for the last three. The other weekends we’ve been visiting my family or trying to “get-a-way” with a weekend trip of our own.
All that being said, we haven’t been to our home church for five weeks in a row. Now our church has this weekly attendance card we fill out just to let them know we attended. And every week we give to the church financially in the form of a check.
But for the last five weeks we have not filled out the card and we haven’t given financially. Do you think anyone noticed?
Don’t get me wrong. I love our church and have no doubts it is where we should be. And to their credit, a counselor from the church did call during the first or second week to see how things were going.
My only question is if they setup the “attendance” card to track attendance and tell the congregation “if we don’t see you in three weeks, we’ll give you a call” and yet no one ever calls, is the system broke? Has our church become so large we are just another number?
I write this not as a complaint or a sob-story, but more as a starting point for some dialog on church size, the word “community” and the personal fellowship of today’s Christian church.
Comments/dialog welcome…
This Life Journey 
It’s always disappointing when a church (or anyone for that matter) makes a commitment and then doesn’t follow through. When our church started the attendance card, I was under the impression it was because we were getting big enough that the church wanted to make sure they weren’t losing track of anyone. It was a response to growth rather than something they thought they could do because the church was small.Honestly, based on my experience, our church has never been great about follow up. On issues like the one you’re experiencing, I would have to bet that a big part of it is based on lack of understanding of technology, but that’s just a guess. So, in that aspect, yes, the system is broken. Our church has significant issues with organization, and a database/spreadsheet of such a magnitude as we’re speaking about here would certainly throw someone without significant training and organization skills.Without knowing the details of what sort of system they have set up, it’s hard to pinpoint the exact problem. However, I definitely think it sounds like something worth looking into. If our church is committed to loving its members (which I believe it is), then it needs to (a) not make commitments it doesn’t know how to keep or (b) make use of its attendees’ skills in applicable areas to improve its systems.Honestly, I don’t think our church is too big right now that it would be impossible to track individual attendance. The problem might be that they just don’t know how to use technology to their advantage to make it happen.
I think chruch is the people. We are the body and we are responsible for each other not the church as an institution.