M6 Membership · Lesson 1 of 4

Lesson 1 — Designing the Belonging Journey

Define the stages between first contact and active membership.

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Nine M curriculum version 1.0 · Nine M methodology, content, exercises and deliverables by Pastor Lee Jenkins.

Where this lesson sits

Curriculum version 1.0 · Pastor Lee Review

Module purpose: Create a clear, relational pathway from first visit to belonging, covenant, retention, and active participation.

Official outcome: Visitor-to-Member Pathway

This lesson produces: Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures

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Learn

Participant study reading — approximately 75 minutes of learning and shared work.

Learning objective: Define the stages between first contact and active membership.

Recommended participants: Membership team, connections coordinator, and at least one pastoral staff member

Estimated teaching time: 75 minutes

Success indicators

• Leadership can name each stage of the belonging journey in plain language
• Entry and exit criteria are defined for every stage
• A conversion measure is identified for each stage transition
• Gaps between the current journey and the desired journey are documented

Materials and evidence you will use

• Stewardship Nsites Connect check-in and follow-up pipeline reports
• Any existing guest card or connection card templates
• Every stage has an entry, exit, measure and owner
• At least one gap is clearly documented for follow-up

What you should be able to produce

• Leadership can name each stage of the belonging journey in plain language
• Entry and exit criteria are defined for every stage
• A conversion measure is identified for each stage transition
• Gaps between the current journey and the desired journey are documented

Foundational ministry principle

Ephesians 2:19

19 Now therefore ye are no more strangers and foreigners, but fellowcitizens with the saints, and of the household of God;

King James Version (KJV) · Public domain

this passage speaks of no longer being strangers but members of God's household, which frames belonging as a journey with a real destination, not an accident.

Draft framing for review: leadership might consider that if Scripture describes believers moving from stranger to household member, the church's own structures should intentionally mirror that movement rather than leaving it to chance.

Understand the concept

Your work in this lesson focuses on this outcome: Define the stages between first contact and active membership.

A belonging journey that is not mapped and measured cannot be improved; naming the stages honestly is the first act of hospitality leadership can offer.

Why it matters for your church

Without a mapped journey, follow-up and orientation depend entirely on individual volunteer memory rather than a shared system.

Stuck points, once named, become the church's clearest priorities for ministry attention and resourcing.

A shared journey map gives every ministry a common vocabulary for talking about guests and new members.

Examine the evidence

Use Stewardship Nsites Connect check-in and follow-up pipeline reports, and Any existing guest card or connection card templates to compare your church's present practice with its stated intentions. Look for documented patterns, missing information, and differences between what people assume and what the evidence supports.

Your completed work should be supported by Every stage has an entry, exit, measure and owner, and At least one gap is clearly documented for follow-up. Record uncertainty honestly so your team knows what still needs to be verified.

Prepare for the shared exercise

Produce a shared, honest picture of how guests currently move toward membership and how leadership wants that journey to work. The Belonging Journey Mapping Workshop produces the Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures, which contributes to the module's principal deliverable.

Before working with your team, consider this reflection: Where in our church's current journey would a guest most likely feel forgotten, and what would it take for that to no longer be true?

Key terms

Belonging journey: The sequence of stages a person moves through from first contact with the church to active, contributing membership.
Stage conversion measure: A specific, trackable percentage or count that shows how many people move from one stage of the journey to the next.
Stuck point: A stage in the journey where people commonly stall or disengage before moving forward.

What this means for a church

• Without a mapped journey, follow-up and orientation depend entirely on individual volunteer memory rather than a shared system.
• Stuck points, once named, become the church's clearest priorities for ministry attention and resourcing.
• A shared journey map gives every ministry a common vocabulary for talking about guests and new members.

Common failure patterns

• Mapping an aspirational journey that no current team has the capacity to deliver.
• Defining stages so vaguely that no one can tell when a person has actually moved from one to the next.
• Skipping the conversion-measure step because it feels like extra work, leaving the map unmeasurable.

Ministry case

The Guest Who Never Returned

A mid-sized congregation prided itself on friendly greeters, but when leadership finally reviewed six months of first-time guest data, they discovered fewer than one in five returned a second time. No one had a map of what a guest experienced after leaving the building on Sunday. There was no second-touch contact, no clear next step offered, and no one assigned to notice the drop-off.

Once the team built a journey map and assigned a conversion measure to the 'first visit to return visit' stage, they discovered the real issue was a seven-to-ten-day gap before any personal follow-up occurred. Naming that stage and that measure was the turning point that led directly into the work of Lesson Two.

Lesson takeaway

A belonging journey that is not mapped and measured cannot be improved; naming the stages honestly is the first act of hospitality leadership can offer.

Discuss

Guided discussion for the leadership table.

Having named our stages and identified our stuck points, we turn now to table discussion to test these ideas against real experience before we move on to designing the follow-up standards that will close the biggest gap we found.

Where in our current journey do guests most often seem to disappear, and why do we think that happens?
Which stage transition would most benefit from having a clear owner and a tracked measure?
What would need to be true for our desired journey map to be realistic within the next two quarters?
Who outside this room needs to see this journey map before it becomes official?

Discussion notes

Practice

Applied exercise — produces the Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures.

Belonging Journey Mapping Workshop

Produce a shared, honest picture of how guests currently move toward membership and how leadership wants that journey to work.

Estimated time: 40 minutes

Participants: Full membership team in small groups of three to four

Artifact produced: Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures

Required inputs

• Recent first-time guest counts
• Any existing connection card or follow-up records
• Stewardship Nsites Connect check-in and follow-up pipeline data where available

Instructions

List every stage a guest currently passes through, from first contact to active membership.
For each stage, write the entry criterion and the exit criterion in plain language.
Identify one conversion measure for each stage transition.
Mark which stages currently have no measure or no owner.
Draft a desired-state version of the journey, adjusting stages, measures or owners as needed.
Circle the single largest gap between current and desired states.
Assign a note-taker to record the gap for the module's 90-day action plan.

Complete it online

Belonging Journey Map

Church name: ______________________
Date completed: ______________________
Facilitator: ______________________

Stage	Entry criterion	Exit criterion	Conversion measure	Current owner	Gap identified

Your response — Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures

Worked example

A fully completed sample using a fictional church. This is illustrative teaching material, not any church's actual data.

Northgate Community Church (illustrative example — not actual church data)

Northgate is a synthetic, illustrative congregation of about 350 people used here to demonstrate a completed journey mapping exercise. It is not based on any real church.

Stage	Entry criterion	Exit criterion	Conversion measure	Current owner	Gap identified
First contact	Person visits website, event, or attends worship for the first time	Guest completes a connection card or is checked in	Percent of attenders who complete a connection card	Front desk volunteer team	No consistent owner named prior to this session
Returning guest	Guest attends a second time within 30 days	Guest is invited to a newcomer coffee	Percent of first-time guests who return within 30 days	Connections coordinator	Follow-up currently takes 10+ days
Connected guest	Guest attends newcomer coffee or meets a ministry leader	Guest expresses interest in orientation	Percent of returning guests who attend newcomer coffee	Connections coordinator	No formal invitation process exists
Prospective member	Guest signs up for orientation	Guest completes orientation session	Percent of connected guests who attend orientation	Membership pastor	Orientation offered only twice a year
Covenant member	Person completes orientation and affirms membership expectations	Person is welcomed publicly and assigned a care team	Percent of orientation attendees who become members	Membership pastor and elder board	No clear handoff to a care team after joining
Active participant	New member is serving, giving, or in a small group within 90 days	Person is engaged in at least one ongoing ministry	Percent of new members active within 90 days	Small groups and serving coordinators	No tracking currently exists at this stage

How this leadership team reasoned

• Leadership recognized that the biggest drop-off was between first contact and returning guest, with follow-up taking far too long.
• They also noticed no one owned the transition from connected guest to prospective member, so interested guests were quietly lost.
• The team decided the desired journey needed a maximum five-day follow-up window and a named owner at every single stage.

Decisions recorded

• Reduce the follow-up window from 10 days to 5 days maximum for all first-time guests.
• Assign the connections coordinator explicit ownership of the newcomer coffee invitation.
• Move from two orientation sessions per year to a monthly offering to reduce the bottleneck.

Completed artifact extract — Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures

Northgate Community Church Belonging Journey Map: Stage 1, First Contact, exit criterion is a completed connection card, owned by the front desk team, measured by percent of attenders who complete a card. Stage 2, Returning Guest, exit criterion is an accepted newcomer coffee invitation delivered within five days, owned by the connections coordinator...

Illustrative exercise score: 18 of 20. The map named every stage with clear entry and exit criteria, attached a measure to each transition, and identified specific, actionable gaps rather than vague concerns, though the 90-day timeline for the monthly orientation shift still needs firmer staffing detail.

Score

Transparent 20-point exercise rubric: four criteria rated 0 to 5 with observable anchors.

Criterion	0 — not evident	3 — acceptable	5 — exemplary	Sample
Completeness (0–5)	No stages, measures or owners are identified.	Most stages are named but several lack a measure or an owner.	Every stage has a clear entry, exit, measure and owner, with both current and desired maps completed.	5
Use of evidence (0–5)	The map is built on guesses with no reference to actual guest data.	Some real data is used but key stages rely on assumption.	The map is grounded in actual guest counts and follow-up records, including Nsites Connect data where available.	4
Alignment to the module purpose (0–5)	The exercise does not connect to building a visitor-to-member pathway.	The map covers guest stages but stops short of connecting to covenant membership.	The map spans the full arc from first contact through active participation, matching the module's principal deliverable.	5
Actionability and ownership (0–5)	No owners or next steps are named anywhere on the map.	Some owners are named but decisions are vague or unassigned.	Every gap has a named owner and a specific decision leadership committed to act on.	4
Worked sample total				18 / 20

Completeness: Northgate's map named all six stages with entry, exit, measure and owner for both current and desired states.
Use of evidence: The team used real follow-up timing data to identify the ten-day delay, though 90-day activity tracking was acknowledged as not yet measured.
Alignment to the module purpose: The map covered the complete arc from first contact to active participation as the module deliverable requires.
Actionability and ownership: Owners and decisions were specific, though the orientation frequency change still needs a named staffing owner to be fully actionable.

Lesson-exercise scores (20 points each) demonstrate learning and artifact quality. They do not automatically overwrite the official Nine M module assessment, which remains a separate 100-point rating of five module dimensions.

Submit evidence

What must be submitted for this lesson to count as complete.

Submit

• Completed Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map worksheet
• List of top three gaps identified for the 90-day plan

Attach this evidence

Every stage has an entry, exit, measure and owner
At least one gap is clearly documented for follow-up

File upload is not implemented in this prototype. Ticking a box records that the church can produce the document; it does not store a file.

Contribute to official outcome

How this lesson builds the Visitor-to-Member Pathway.

Artifact produced: Current and Desired Belonging Journey Map with stage conversion measures

Establishes the lifecycle-stage structure that every later lesson in this module builds upon.

Open the module deliverable assembly

Participant reflection and notes

Where in our church's current journey would a guest most likely feel forgotten, and what would it take for that to no longer be true?

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