The church’s youth pastor, Bob Ross, said it’s a way of trying to encourage young people to attend the event. The church expected hundreds of teenagers from as far away as Canada.

I was seriously expecting, hoping, that the link would take me to the onion…but this is a real honest promotion.

Church marketing MUST be about more than getting butts in the seat, it’s about more than a gimmick or attracting attention…it MUST be about life change. Go ahead and give your iPods away, serve free coffee and donuts, but be about more than the number of people that walk through your doors. Be about the number of lives that are shaped and molded by God.

And for the love of all of sanity…use your head. When you as a church do something like this, you cast a cloud over many churches.

All very popular questions…and certainly something easily measured. While these measurements have some value I agree with Scoble and Seth, it’s the who and more importantly, the what, that really matters.

Yes, you need butts in the seats on a Sunday morning and we want to help you do that. Without people in church you can’t do the really important stuff. So start with the “how many” question…but quickly move to:

Who are attending? Are you simply taking people from another church? Is your Easter production filled with people that have never heard the story or people that are fulfilling a holiday tradition? Do they all look like you, or do they look like the girl that works at strip join on Friday night? Are you reaching the people that need to know, that have never heard of the hope that is in Christ?

What are they doing?Do they come in, sing a few songs and go home or is there real life change? Do they walk straight to “their” seat or do they interact with those around them? Do they end up at the altar or do they just pat you on the back and say ‘good sermon’? The most popular church activity should be change.

I’ve said it before, if their aren’t stories of God’s transformation then it doesn’t matter how many people show up or how amazing the graphics are…it’s a failure.

So that’s your new church ROI: How many lives were changed.

I watch the stats of the blog, the other day 2 people dropped off. Now I don’t who they are or why they left…but honestly, it hurts when people leave. Here’s what I did and maybe it will give you something to think about next time someone leaves your church.

Was it something I said? I went back to the last few posts to check if I had maybe ruffled any feathers or maybe put too much emotion in a post…I evaluated the content.

Was it something I missed? I had to ask if I wasn’t giving something that was being looked for. I checked our analytics for search terms, looked at the health of our postings in terms of clicks…I monitored the health of the blog.

I then admitted that while I hope this blog will fill with people and comments (if you’re reading blogs please post now and then) I realized that sometimes people leave and sometimes there isn’t rhyme or reason…people simply leave. I also reminded myself that I am here for the whole and can’t tear down the building and reconstruct for one person.

What do you do when people leave? I do think it is important to assess now and then, but don’t panic…people will leave and new people will arrive.