Growth doesn’t cost a church depth. It costs visibility — and someone has to close the distance.
By Luke Denton
When the world shut down in 2020, my staff and I did something that felt almost old-fashioned: we split up our entire church database and started calling people.
Not just the pastors.
My IT guys were on the phone.
I remember one of them dialing a name he’d never spoken to: “Hi, it’s Steve, I just wanted to see if you’re OK.” And then, a little more bravely, “Can I pray for you?”
We thought we were doing something small. We weren’t ready for what came back. People told us they’d been coming to our church for 15 years and no one had ever called them. Personally. Ever. Others we called had already left a year and a half earlier, and told us so, gently. We didn’t know.
The room still looked full on Sunday. It just wasn’t the same
room anymore.
That’s the moment I stopped thinking this was a heart problem. My staff cared. I cared. We just couldn’t see who needed us until it was too late to matter.
It’s the space between when someone at church starts drifting and when someone on staff finally notices. Sometimes that’s a few Sundays. For us, it was a year and a half. As a church grows, you can’t rely on knowing everyone anymore.
I’ve talked to pastors who tried to solve this problem by hand long before it had a name: a sticky note, a spreadsheet, five minutes in a staff meeting asking who’s missing. Instinct was never the problem. Seeing in time was.
The information you need already exists. It’s just scattered and disconnected. Attendance lives in one system, giving in another, small groups and communications somewhere else again. As an executive pastor overseeing technical operations, I had the best dashboards that have ever been built. But I couldn’t get answers when I started asking questions like, “Who walked into our building last weekend? What are their names?” The tools were never the problem. The gap between them was. That’s the Shepherding Gap.
So I created Nurture to solve for that. The first problem we had to solve was consolidating data across systems to get it into one view. That doesn’t mean more charts. That means the ability to get actionable insights across disconnected platforms. The next level is where I get serious about this as a pastor: those actions need accountability. They have to be assigned to a specific person — a pastor, a small group leader, or a volunteer coordinator willing to send a text or place a call. And finally, I want to see the outcome. If they were contacted, I want to see that they’re back to attending, giving and serving and moving through the steps of discipleship. This is what a Ministry System of Action can do for a church that truly desires for every person to be seen and known.
WHAT COMMUNITY CHURCH DID
At Community Church in Ashburn, Va., noticing a change in someone’s participation was only the starting point; the real question was what was happening in that person’s life.
After getting started with Nurture, a volunteer showed up flagged “at risk.” Someone on the team chimed in, “She’s doing great, she serves every week.” But then her direct leader spoke up: she’d actually been out for a month, caring for her mother who’d been in the hospital. Same person, two completely different pictures: one from a distance, one up close. That’s the Shepherding Gap.
A flag is a reason to ask, not a conclusion about someone’s faith. The point isn’t just to get somebody back on the schedule. It’s to find out how they’re doing. That’s why this information belongs with the leaders closest to people, not buried in a report.
Community Church built 10 minutes into every staff meeting to open the Nurture dashboard and reach out to people. Seventy-seven people who’d started drifting came back to active engagement after a single contact — 72.6% of everyone flagged. On the other side of it, 81.8% of the people who slid all the way into fully disengaged had never been reached at all. Nobody chose to let them go; the drift just stayed invisible until they were gone.
“We were missing the essential part of why people leave,” says Preston Turpin, Senior Director of Ministry at Community Church. “We began to realize they really do drift. We started to feel conviction that our retention was a care issue, that care was ultimately a connection issue, and that connection is a leadership issue.”
NO PASTOR WAS EVER SUPPOSED TO KNOW EVERYONE
But every person was always supposed to be known by someone. Every number has a name, every name has a story, and every story matters to God.
The question worth asking your team this week is how long your own church’s gap actually is. When somebody starts pulling away, who notices, and who makes sure somebody follows through?
Curious where your gap might be hiding? Take Nurture’s free Shepherding Gap Audit at shepherdinggap.com.
Luke Denton is the founder of Nurture, the first Ministry Action System for churches now part of Pushpay. After 17 years in full-time ministry, including executive leadership at a 10-campus church, he coined the term the Shepherding Gap and created Nurture to close it.
