Pastor’s Ponderings—May 2025

To the church of God as found at Marion Salem Church, called to be saints together with those in every place who call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ: You are miracles of God’s grace and mercy!

“So everyone who acknowledges me before men, I also will acknowledge before my Father who is in heaven, but whoever denies me before men, I also will deny before my Father who is in heaven.” Matthew 10:32-33 (ESV) I was praying in the sanctuary, by this time it was probably a couple months ago. Part of what I do is sit in the pews and move around to each seat. As I do I’ll go through the pew racks, unfold pages and remove papers that are in the Bibles and hymnals. Pew racks are the gift that keeps on giving. You can clean them out time and again and still you’ll find something that was missed previously. On this particular pass, I found a bulletin from the early 2000’s and it had a perforated connection card on the bulletin. The connection cards that we have been using in worship at Salem recently are not so new to us. (Let’s all be thankful that the days of attendance pads are gone for good!)

I know that some are resistant to filling out a connection card, yet I would like to encourage you to think of it in light of what Jesus said in Matthew 10. By completing a connection card (or when you join the Livestream) you make a statement, you are acknowledging Christ before others. It’s very easy to write your name. They only have to be completely filled out when information changes. Then you just drop it in the offering plate.

What happens next? During the attendance rally and moving into the future, attendance at worship is recorded like with Sunday school. This is useful in several ways. First, it is a lot easier to catch visitors’ information. I’ve been able to send several welcome letters for the first time because of connection cards. Secondly, noting attendance patterns can help us reach members that might be quietly struggling. A note of encouragement at the right time can be life changing and attendance patterns help discern that timing.

One of the vital parts of Wesleyan tradition is “watching over one another in love.” I can barely keep track of my own comings and goings without my calendar app. I check it every evening for the next day to know what I need to do. It is impossible to keep up with the spiritual needs of 110 people without good practices like watching worship attendance with connection cards. The attendance rally over the past several weeks helped us to build this important habit so let’s continue to live into it and begin to reap the fruit from it.

What fruit you ask? Because I’ve got the attendance patterns in front of me, I can see that we have a few families on the margins in our congregation. Before I had a subjective feeling that they attended more often than they do, yet the objective information has corrected my knowledge and I plan to check-in on them. This isn’t a shame thing. I don’t want to guilt them into being in worship—that doesn’t work anyway. I do want them to know that they are missed and make the ministries of the church available to them. The other fruit that this has born is that our Livestream ministry is far more effective and utilized than I realized. Prior to the attendance rally I would have said our Livestream averages 3-5 weekly and solely used by members. The attendance rally has shown the average weekly viewership is triple that, and about 25% are people who do not attend Salem. Only because of widespread connection card use, an attendance rally that highlighted attendance and invitations, and watching the trends has this been realized.

This is what I know. Congregations that only track attendance by headcount don’t grow because people are more than numbers. We can do better as a congregation for each other and those we reach, by leaning into this new habit more and more. So when you come to worship on Sunday, even without an attendance rally, fill out the card

Blessings,

Jason