Ready to automate some of those important but repetitious communication and follow-up tasks?   Workflows are here and just released!  Read this post carefully to get the details.

So far in this series we've looked at how assimilation relates to evenagelism and discipleship.  We've talked about it being a process that is more complex than it appears and that groups are a great way to shepherd people at different places on a spiritual continuum toward the same goal of full church engagement.  Today's topic is more traditional in nature, but with a little twist.  It's on using attributes -  pieces of information you track on a person's individual profile - as benchmarks.  

Webster defines process as "a series of actions or steps taken in order to achieve a particular end".  Naturally, we imply from this that all processes are linear.  In assimilation, this means we are looking for the strategic steps we want people to take in moving from first time guests to fully engaged members of our church.  We want steps 1, 2, 3, 4 to be crystal clear and then everyone involved to faithfully march through these steps.  The problem is that people don't start at the same place along the spiritual growth continuum and they aren't gifted the same.  So as you begin creating structure to execute the strategy, managing process gets complicated. We've found it helpful to think of assimilation as a network of groups to manage this complexity.  These groups serve as pools and  dashboards for managing the movement of people through process.  

For our purposes assimilation is the process of intentionally helping first time guests become fully engaged members of your local church.  This is the first of eight blog posts on how church management software, specifically Churchteams, can help you manage this process.  Not just once, not just occassionally, but every time over the long haul.

In the past several weeks I’ve been working with an Executive Admin of a large church to reorganize their data structure for effective assimilation.  You could tell by the different fragments of data that several different approaches to assimilation had been implemented through the years. Usually this happens when different church staff use different fields to track the same information.  Or sometimes there are different perceptions of what the assimilation process actually is.

Last week  I was at the assimilation conference put on by Church Leader Insights. Nelson Searcy and Kerrick Thomas, started and built Journey Church in New York and have been training pastors for many years through CLI.  Nelson was an engineer by training and cut his teeth on  ministry at Saddleback in the 90s.  A few months ago Nelson asked us to come alongside to partner with them to serve churches.  He knew our history and background.  I knew theirs.  It was a no-brainer for us to work with them.  They are known for training churches on the 8 systems of building and managing church.  Last week the focus was on assimilation.

Tomorrow I'm heading to the Church Leader Insights training on Assimilation.  I thought it might be interesting to write something ahead of time about my thoughts about the topic and then follow it up with thoughts on what I learned about assimilation from this excellent training by Nelson Searcy.