Following Up With Guests by Hand vs. With a System

January 2012. A church plant in Kansas City.

The team met in a room they called the Red Room. Red walls. Always cold. A large whiteboard on the wall.

That room is where the idea for Text In Church started.

"So who is going to be in charge of this?"

Our co-founder, Tyler Smith, was on that church plant's leadership team. That night, they built what they thought was the perfect guest follow-up plan. Two weeks of texts, emails, and even a phone call, mapped out in detail on the whiteboard. Everyone was excited.

Then Pastor Eric asked one question. "Ok, so who is going to be in charge of this?"

Crickets. Nobody raised their hand. Not even Tyler.

Not because they didn't care. Not because the plan was bad. Because every person in that room was already maxed out. The plan sat on the whiteboard for weeks, and slowly, everyone stopped looking at it.

If you've ever been in a meeting like that, you're not alone. Nearly every church has one.

The idea on a snowy road

As Tyler tells it in Boomerang, he was driving home that same night on a snow-covered road when his phone buzzed. It was a text from Southwest Airlines letting him know his flight the next day was delayed.

Simple. Timely. Personal. Automated, but it felt like someone was thinking about him.

And the question hit him: why can't a church follow up like that?

When he called his brother Matt, who was planting a church in California, Matt pushed back hard. The church isn't customer support, he said. You can't bombard people with automated messages and call it ministry.

That tension became the philosophy behind the whole book. Automation doesn't replace relationships. It protects them. Or as the book says, "You can't automate a relationship. But you can build a system to help start one."

You don't need Text In Church to do this

We'll say what the book says. You can follow up with every guest by hand.

Boomerang even shows you how. Open a Google Sheet. One row per guest. The sixteen touchpoints go down the columns, each with the day it goes out. When a connect card comes in, add the row and enter the visit date, and that sheet becomes the guest's schedule. Then put one person's name at the top of it.

And it works. The book shares the story of a church that built a manual version of this exact plan before automating anything. Right out of the gate, their guest retention jumped about 25 percent.

The catch? Running it by hand ate the better part of a day every week. That's the honest tradeoff. A people-powered system works, and it's heavy.

Where the manual version breaks

Here's how Boomerang describes it: "It works, and a faithful spreadsheet beats an abandoned platform. But nothing in it sends on its own. Every message goes out because a person remembered, every week, every month, with no week off. Vacation. Stomach flu. Easter."

A system doesn't get tired

Follow-up rarely fails because people stop caring. It fails because people get tired. The book says a system "has stamina you don't, because it doesn't get tired, distracted, or busy. It just keeps showing up."

In Text In Church, the six-week plan runs whether anyone remembers or not. The texts, the emails, and the timing are all set once. The human touches, like the handwritten note and the phone call, show up on your team's weekly list so the people part never gets skipped.

That frees you up to do the thing only you can do: be present when a guest opens the door.

It's the same lesson one of the book's pastors, Faith, learned when her Sunday nights finally changed. Boomerang sums it up in one line: "Stop being the system. Build one instead."

Pick your path

If you want to build it yourself, start with the book. Boomerang gives you all sixteen touches, the templates, and the six-week calendar. The hardcover is free, you just cover shipping, and it comes with the audiobook and the Boomerang Kit. Get your free copy here.

If you'd rather skip the build, Text In Church sets up the entire six-week plan in about an hour and you can try it free. You already have the heart for this. Give it a system that doesn't get tired.