Congregation signed up to different activities
• Christians have expressed they feel more confident in inviting people (with 72% saying they feel confident inviting non-Christians to suitable courses, events or services at their church) and is reflected in our most recent brand awareness research which shows a 14% increase in the number of people being invited to Alpha YOY with a particular increase in men saying they’d been invited
• 53% of non-Christians know a Christian and of those 53% - 35% said that non-Christian was a friend closely followed by a family member at 31%
• From the research we conducted through Ipsos Mori we know that personal friends and family are the top place 20-35 year old non-Christians go to for advice (alongside the news)
• 55% of people who have a Christian friend have had a conversation about faith
• 1 in 3 people outside of the church, after having a conversation with a practicing Christian, wanted to know more about Jesus. This is up from 1 in 5 from 2015
• 43% of practicing Christians said they don’t feel they know any non-Christian friends well enough to invite them to a course, event or service at their church
• Attendance of an Alpha was also up by 15% from last year but interestingly, of those who are aware of Alpha, 52% of them know a family member, friend or someone whose attended the Alpha course which means 8% more of people know someone whose attended versus being invited
“We really want to be able to include non-Christians in our church but find it very hard to convert our grocery store, fun days and socials. We need to find a better way to introduce church to these people who have never experienced church”
– Claire Patterson from Kings Church, Salford
Takeaways
There has been an increase in confidence and inviting from practicing Christians since the pandemic
There still seems to be an opportunity for people to invite with 45% not having those faith conversations in spite of confidence to do so.
There’s a challenge for Christians to know and build relationships with non-Christians. We’d therefore encourage you and your congregation to go where non-Christians are.
The personal invite has always been key to seeing guests attend an Alpha and is important as ever. Continuing to equip your congregation to be able to have those conversations and to feel empowered to invite their non-Christian family, friends and community is key. Especially as we see more scepticism around the Church currently – they can act as a bridge
With this struggle to reach non-Christians we see an opportunity through this new campaign, to help drive the demand to try Alpha by targeting the potential guest directly
“When we launched Pattern church we were aware that it’s so easy for everyone in church to get busy doing church activities every evening of the week.
That’s why we're experimenting with keeping all of our organised events to Sundays and Wednesday. That’s Alpha, youth, kids groups, connect groups, book club, leaders meetings, young adults, grow baby, socials, the whole lot!
We hope this means that as well as having a natural progression for people coming off Alpha to join one of our Pattern groups (because they’re on the same night), it also gives people time to build friendships with people outside the church – joining football clubs, being school governors, engaging with their neighbours and local communities. So when it comes to launching Alpha we know that people in our congregation have got lots of people they can invite.”
– Joel Sales from Pattern Church, Swindon
