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MISTAKE – Expecting that when somebody visits they will come back the following week.

• When Pete first planted he had a first time visitor almost every week.
• This is very positive as it makes you outward looking.
• The downside is having an expectation that they will come back and becoming discouraged when they don’t.
• This can play into our sense of being a people pleaser.
• We can also let it effect our marriages.
• It can be easy to be constantly chasing the visitor.
• In the early days of his first plant, Pete did his follow up by hand-written letters and invitations to dinner.
• Often we don’t look at church over a season, we look at it in a single week snapshot and respond too much to a down-week.
• The key is a genuine belief that God is sovereign and builds his church.
• Pragmatically, build with people not on people.
• Recognise that people will come and go.
• Get people involved early.
• For marriage, the mistake is spending too much time chasing people and not investing enough time into your wife and kids.
• Doing it this way might slow things down slightly but is way more sustainable.
• The competition is not other churches – it is sport, drinking, shopping etc.
• Doing tea and coffee both before and after the meetings gives time for people to connect.
• Stories help people connect.
• Termly small groups can be very good.
• Values tend to be much more important to leaders than they are to the people in the church.
• Every place is so different that you need to study a place to find the shape of a church for that place – we are not about mimicking or franchising someone else’s church.
• Releasing people into their workplaces is really important.