Some Warm Bodies In a Room

People attract people.

When somebody first walks into one of your meetings, they are quite quickly weighing up a lot of things. They want to know whether God is at work. They want to know whether it will be fun to stick around. They want to know whether it is a safe place. They want to know if they are likely to make friends. 

And so people look for clues. And one of the clues is whether there are other people there or not. This is called social proof. It’s like if you turned up at a restaurant on a Saturday night and there was nobody else there at all – it would probably make you suspicious that it wasn’t very good (whether this is true or not).

It is important that you are able to gather some people as you start holding your meetings. These may not necessarily be the people who end up as part of the plant long term (Geoff Surratt makes the helpful distinction between people who are ‘scaffolding’ for the plant and people who are ‘bricks’).  If somebody is up for giving you a few months, turning up to your meetings, engaging with them, enjoying themselves and helping your community to form, before then going on and doing something else, you should snatch their hand off.

You need all the people you can get!