New Way of Keeping Small Groups Stats

One of the major statistics we watch closely at Five Oaks is our percentage of participation in small groups. The way we do the count is by taking the number of people enrolled in small groups over against our total number of regular attenders (that's anyone who has attended about four times or more and continued to attend). 

Finding our enrollment number is super easy now that we're using GroupFinder online. But getting our regular attender number is always more difficult because the database is cleaned up only periodically. (It's a time consuming job, as you can imagine.)

So we're going to go with a method that is used in a growing number of churches. I think it may be the new standard. With it, we can almost instantly do an assessment, and we will be able to compare over against other churches that excel in small groups since most use this method.

The way most do it to take their small group enrollment and compare it to their average worship attendance over a given period of time (usually a month). The average worship attendance only includes people in the worship center and excludes children's ministry numbers.

Using this method, we were at 62% involvement in September. 

How does that compare with our other way of calculating? Not sure yet because our database needs some cleaning up right now. But when that clean up is done, I'll do a calculation and we'll see see the difference and then have that as a measure to use when making comparisons to the past.