# The thirty-six hour plan Church Posting. Companion to churchposting.com/resources/growth/reaching-a-community-without-gimmicks/ Twelve people, three hours, twice a year. That is the budget this plan assumes, because it is the budget a congregation with a median Sunday attendance of seventy actually has. Everything here is written to be printed and handed out. Three parts: 1. The door walk, run twice a year 2. The fixed weekly shift, held for a year 3. The funeral and wedding hosting standard Take one. Two is ambitious. Three is a fantasy that ends with the same six people doing all of it. --- ## Part 1: the door walk ### Before the Saturday - Draw the half mile on a paper map. Split it into six routes of about 170 addresses each. Number the routes and write the street names on each sheet. - Order cards. The smallest print run most shops will quote is 2,500, which runs about $250, so order once and use the rest on the second walk. - Put four things on the card and nothing else: the street address, the service time, one plain sentence about what happens in that hour, and a phone number a human answers. No verse, no photograph of the building, no slogan. - Name one person who holds the master list and who receives every note that comes back. If nobody holds the list, the notes go in a drawer. - Decide now what you will do with a request for help, because you will get one before noon. Write the name of the person who handles it on every route sheet. ### Pairs, not singles Two people per route. One talks, one writes. Nobody walks alone and nobody walks in a group of four, which reads as a delegation. ### What to say at the door Read this out loud before you leave. Thirty seconds, not two minutes. > Good morning. I am [name] and this is [name]. We are from the church at [street > address], about four blocks that way. We are walking the neighborhood to > introduce ourselves, and we have a card with our service time on it. Is there > anything happening on this street we should know about? Then stop talking. The last question is the whole point of the walk. Write down the answer. ### What never to say - Anything that starts "Do you have a church home?" - Anything about where the person will spend eternity, on a doorstep, to a stranger, in the first thirty seconds. - A promise about a program that does not exist yet. - A promise that somebody will call. Say what the card says and leave. ### If nobody answers Leave the card in the door, not in the mailbox. A mailbox is a federal letterbox and a card without postage does not belong in it. Mark the address as no answer on the route sheet. ### What to record, per address Copy this onto the back of every route sheet. | Column | What goes in it | | --- | --- | | Address | Number and street | | Answered | Yes or no | | First name | Only if offered | | What they told us | The street's problem, the school, the noise, the flooding | | Asked for something | What, and who is handling it | | Follow up | Yes or no, and by when | Expect about 28 doors an hour per pair and expect about a third of them to answer. Thirty-six volunteer hours produces roughly 1,000 doors and roughly 356 conversations. Those two numbers come from the New Haven canvassing experiment, which measured voting rather than church attendance, so treat them as the shape of the work and not as a forecast of who visits. ### The Monday after - The list holder types every note into one document. Not six documents. - Every request for help gets an answer within a week, including the answer no. - Read the sheets out loud at the next leadership meeting. What the neighborhood told you about itself is worth more than the visitor count and it is the part everybody forgets to look at. - Set the date of the second walk before the meeting ends. ### What success looks like at ninety days Not attendance. Attendance is the wrong instrument for this and forcing it turns the walk into recruitment, which the neighborhood detects immediately. Count these instead: - Conversations recorded - Requests for help answered, including the ones you declined - Neighbors a member can now name - Streets somebody has walked twice --- ## Part 2: the fixed weekly shift A building unlocked and staffed at the same hour every week beats any one-day event, because a neighborhood learns a schedule and forgets a festival. ### The commitment, in writing > [Name] and [name] will open the building every [day] from [time] to [time], > from [start date] to [end date], twelve months. Coffee, a bathroom, and two > people who are glad you came. Both names sign it. An elder countersigns. It goes on the wall in the office. ### What it costs Two people, three hours, fifty weeks is 300 donated hours. Priced at the 2025 Independent Sector estimate of $36.14 an hour, that is $10,842 of the congregation's scarcest asset. Cash cost is coffee. Anyone who calls this free has not looked at the second number. ### Rules that keep it alive past March - One fixed hour. Not "most weeks". - Two named people with two named substitutes. Four names total, written down. - No presentation, no sign-up sheet, no sales step attached to the coffee. - If the two named people cannot make it three weeks running, cancel the shift publicly and stop. A door that is sometimes locked is worse than a door that was never opened. --- ## Part 3: the funeral and wedding hosting standard These are the only events in a church year where the room fills with people who did not choose to come and who are paying attention. Almost no church has written down how it hosts them. ### Decide these once, and write them down | Question | Your answer | | --- | --- | | Do you host a funeral for a non-member? | | | Do you host a wedding for a non-member? | | | What do you charge a member? | | | What do you charge a non-member? | | | Who is the named contact, and what is their phone number? | | | How fast do they reply? Name the number of hours. | | | Who unlocks, who cleans, who runs the sound? | | | Who receives the family in the parking lot? | | | Who makes coffee, and for how many? | | | Who writes the printed order of service, and by when? | | | Who calls the family two weeks later, and again at one year? | | ### The parts nobody writes down and everybody notices - One named person meets the family at the curb and stays with them. - The printed order of service tells a stranger when to stand and when to sit. Most of the room has never been in your building. - The restrooms are found without asking. - Somebody answers the phone on the second ring for two weeks afterward. - The one-year call happens. Put it in the calendar the same week as the funeral, or it will not. ### Two facts worth knowing before you set the fee Cremation was projected to reach 63.4 percent of US dispositions in 2025, and 58.3 percent of people surveyed had attended a funeral in a non-traditional location. Both figures come from the National Funeral Directors Association. A church that is inflexible about caskets, timing, and reception space is opting out of most of the funerals happening around it. Religious institutions hosted 22 percent of US weddings in 2017, down from 41 percent in 2009, on figures The Knot supplied and Lifeway Research reported. The fee schedule, the rehearsal policy, and how fast somebody returns a call are doing more of that work than any promotion budget. --- ## Sources - USPS, Every Door Direct Mail. https://www.usps.com/business/every-door-direct-mail.htm. Read 29 July 2026. - Independent Sector, Value of Volunteer Time. https://independentsector.org/resource/value-of-volunteer-time/. Read 29 July 2026. - Gerber and Green, New Haven canvassing field experiment. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC17987/. Read 29 July 2026. - National Funeral Directors Association, Statistics. https://nfda.org/news/statistics. Read 29 July 2026. - Lifeway Research on The Knot venue figures. https://research.lifeway.com/2018/05/31/why-no-one-may-be-getting-married-at-your-church-this-summer/. Read 29 July 2026.