The Heart of Tracking Attendance

THE NUMBERS GAME

“How many students showed up last night?” Have you ever heard that before and wondered if that’s all people really care to ask when it comes to your ministry? No doubt, numbers have long been a big focus in the church, mainly because they provide a somewhat tangible way to measure ministry health, and also because it’s sometimes impossible to measure the spirituality of a 6th-grade student whose main topics of conversation are Fortnite, their crush of the week, what’s trending, or maybe World War 2 planes.

Numbers can provide us with something to strive for or to work on as leaders, or they can be a crutch in our ministry. We know, and I hope you all agree, that numbers are not everything. It may be easy to fall into sin and put our hope in numbers and highly attended events. But sometimes, in an effort to combat that extreme, we fall to the other extreme of never looking at numbers or attendance. I want to challenge us leaders with something the Lord has challenged our ministry with: the ministry of attendance tracking. Not for the sake of patting ourselves on the back, but to help lead, shepherd, and care for our students and families week in and week out, that God has called us to serve.

Now, we come from a mid-sized regional church and have been running an average of 90-115 students over the last two years of ministry. Throughout those years, we chose to supplement the trusty Planning Center check-ins system with manual attendance tracking. Our Student Director created an Excel spreadsheet that could only be compared to a Picasso-level work of art for us to track attendance and communications with. (I am not a formulas or math gal, so praise God for teammates with skills I don’t have.) We update this Excel sheet every week with who attended that week, who we reached out to via text or postcard that week, and which kids we’ve been missing. We also share it with our small group leaders for them to be able to contact their group members or students who are listed but aren’t currently engaged.

NAMES AND FACES

We created the spreadsheet for two main reasons: student retention and student engagement. Our Excel sheet helped us see names and faces versus numbers. We can see who attends regularly, who our first-time guests are, which kids don’t participate in the student ministry, and which kids have been MIA for a few weeks. Though our process is somewhat overkill, it helps us to ensure that no student slips through the cracks without hearing from us to invite them back or to keep up with what’s going on in their lives. No matter the size of your youth group, this can be done in any context. I think every student ministry can benefit from having someone sit down each week and mark the names of those who attended that week, as well as review the list of students who aren’t currently engaged in your ministry. Constantly putting your students’ names in front of your eyes helps to drive creativity in ministry. It helps us ask our team:

• How can we pour into our core group of students?
• How can we reach this family that hasn’t been involved in the last year?
• Why do we have kids come on Sunday Morning who don’t come Sunday Night?
• Why did we have 80 first-time guests, and 75% of them never came back?

AREAS OF WEAKNESS

The last one is a problem we discovered over the summer, thanks to our attendance tracking. We had 80 first-time guests over the year (Praise God!), but 75% of them never came back. Realizing this forced us to see that we were failing somewhere along the way. We had a wide-open back door that made it easy for students to bring their friends, but just as easy for them to never come again. So, now we have made that our project for the 2025-2026 school year - closing the back door. And again, it's not about the numbers, but it’s about souls that showed up with a friend and never wanted to come back for whatever reason. Our goal for our ministry is for it to be a place where we equip our students to minister to other students, to bring their friends, to serve, to build community, and to worship. If they bring friends, and those friends don’t want to come back, we have a problem to work on.

As all youth ministers know, we are always finding ways to grow as leaders, grow our students, and grow the Kingdom. Attendance tracking has been one thing that has served us over the years to expose areas of weakness in our ministry, areas that the Lord wants us to fix to serve our students more effectively, and areas where we need to grow.

And so, I challenge you! Whether you are ministering to 12 or are ministering to 500, the logistics side of your ministry can be just as impactful as turning your worship center into a dodgeball arena (like we just did) or preaching a memorable message. Who knows, maybe you're a rockstar and can preach a memorable message while you’re playing dodgeball! Either way, keeping up with your students is important. They will remember you sending a birthday postcard, or a text inviting them to come back, or a call asking how they’ve been when you haven’t seen them in a few weeks.

It may not be an Excel Sheet, but even just a Word document or a section of your whiteboard will serve you well in keeping up with your kiddos. Find somewhere to keep a roster of all the students attending your church with their families through regular worship, events, or holidays. Keep up each week with the students who attend, first-time guests, and those you haven’t seen in a while. At the end of the year, you will be able to look back and see more tangible ways that God has used you beyond just nameless numbers. Maybe it’s a student who started coming with a friend and then attended every week the rest of the year - that’s a huge win! Maybe it’s a student who went MIA for a while and a phone call brought them back into the community (WIN!). Keeping statistics will actually help you see who your core kids are and who you need to pursue. So, keep attendance.

PS – If you want to check out our Attendance Sheet, feel free to CLICK HERE and make a copy to download yourself. It really only works in Google Sheets with the formulas, but you can see how it works!

Share your thoughts with others in our YM360 community:

1. How can I better disciple the core group of kids I have and equip them to minister?
2. How can I pursue students who are not currently engaged in church and bring them into the community?

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