Keeping Visitors

A new family decides to visit your church. Now what? Is your church prepared to do what it takes to integrate them as healthy, growing members of your church?

This book provides a systematic approach to answering the questions, "How can I keep more visitors coming to my church?" and "Why aren't we able to hang on to them once they come?"

Most church leaders struggle with this issue of keeping visitors. Visitors assume the church will connect them to others and God, and the church assumes that the visitors will do what it takes to connect until they become a part of the church. In this day and age, this isn't a reliable strategy, especially for non-Christians, as the church is not yet the driving force of their lives. Churches must think through the steps of welcoming and assimilating visitors into the church to maximize its potential for Christ.

Dr. Gil Stieglitz introduces this practical, workable assimilation system to help churches work through a visitor assimilation process. This process really does work. Churches implementing the ideas in Keeping Visitors report significant jumps in their visitor retention rates, one even as high as 93%! The process is not personality-driven but instead reaches out with the love of Christ and welcomes people into a community of faith.

Dr. Gil Stieglitz is an author, speaker, catalyst, professor, leadership consultant, and President/Founder of Principles to Live By. He is currently Discipleship Groups Pastor of Bayside Church in Roseville, California, an adjunct professor at Western Seminary (Sacramento Campus), and a church consultant for Thriving Churches International. He is also on the board at Courage Worldwide - a wonderful organization that rescues children forced into sexual slavery. He has been a denominational executive for fifteen years with the Evangelical Free Church of America. He was senior pastor at a church in southern California for seventeen years.