Book Highlights: Focus

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Focus: The Top Ten Things People Want and Need from You and Your Church is the third book based on REVEAL research. The gist of the book is to look at what people want from their church and what they actually need for spiritual growth and vitality. Then they do the same thing for what people want and need from their senior pastor. The idea is to help church ministries and pastors prioritize.

Top Highlights:

  • Based on their research what people want most and need most match. People's top want is spiritual guidance and that's their top need. 
  • Spiritual guidance = helps me develop a personal relationship with Christ; challenges me to grow and take next steps; provides a clear pathway that helps guide my spiritual growth; church leaders model and consistently reinforce how to grow spiritually; helps me understand the Bible in greater depth.
  • Belonging (not meaning ownership but affiliation, like with a favorite sports team) is the second most powerful driver for satisfaction and needs to be prioritized by churches, even though it is not a spiritual growth driver, otherwise they won't stay around for spiritual guidance.
  • Although "encourages me to take responsibility for my own spiritual growth" didn't factor for satisfaction, it is one of the most important needs and therefore needs to be creatively prioritized.
  • People want preaching and vision casting from their senior pastor but most need spiritual challenge for growth. No match.
  • The match comes when you look at what people want out of preaching/vision casting: Bible learning, modeling spiritual growth and challenge to grow and take next steps.
  • One of the huge surprises: for senior pastors, the role of leading the church had four times the impact on satisfaction with the church's role in spiritual growth compared to the role of teaching/preaching. Even the best sermon doesn't have nearly the spiritual impact as do the day-to-day decisions a senior pastor makes about how to lead a church--specifically the decisions that deliver spiritual guidance through the church.
  • We catalyze their spiritual growth by helping them understand the Bible in greater depth, by challenging them to apply Scriptures with specific next steps and by modeling how we are taking those steps ourselves.