The one ChMS report that tells you if people are actually connecting

Annual reports can make a church look healthy while still missing whether people are actually connected. Sunday attendance may hold steady. Giving may look stable. Volunteer rosters may appear strong. By the visible metrics, everything can seem fine.

The harder question is whether the people in the room know one another well enough to carry burdens together. A church management system can show who attended, who gave, and who served. It takes a different kind of report to show whether people are forming the relationships that help them belong.

Most of us have been there. We open our church management software, pull up attendance trends, and feel reasonably informed. Attendance gives us a number. It tells us how many people walked through the door. What it doesn’t tell us is whether any of those people are forming the kinds of relationships that keep them coming back for reasons deeper than habit.

There’s a specific report that answers that question. Most ChMS platforms can generate some version of it, and most churches never run it.

The report: group participation rate over time

The report worth paying attention to is your group participation rate, sometimes called your “connection rate” or “engagement percentage.” The math is simple: take the number of people actively participating in a small group, ministry team, class, or serving role, and divide it by the total number of people who attend your church regularly.

That ratio tells you something attendance alone never will. It tells you whether people are moving from the lobby to the living room.

A church of 80 where 50 people are in some kind of group has a participation rate of about 63%. A church of 300 where 60 people are connected to a group sits at 20%. The second church looks healthier by attendance. The first church is almost certainly healthier by every measure that matters over time.

This isn’t a theory about church growth strategy. It’s a pattern that plays out in retention data year after year. People who belong to a group of some kind, whether that’s a Wednesday night Bible study or a monthly service team, stay. People who only attend on Sundays drift. Not always quickly. Sometimes it takes two or three years. But the trajectory is remarkably consistent.

Why attendance alone misleads us

Nobody tracks attendance with bad intentions. We count heads because we care about the people those heads belong to. And attendance does tell us something real: it confirms that people are choosing to be present. That matters.

The problem is what attendance can’t distinguish. It treats a first-time visitor the same as a ten-year member. It treats someone who slipped in late and left during the closing prayer the same as someone who stayed an extra forty-five minutes talking in the parking lot. The number goes up by one in both cases.

When attendance is the primary metric we watch, we start to unconsciously optimize for it. We ask “how many came?” after every Sunday, and that question shapes what we pay attention to. It shapes what we celebrate. Over months and years, it shapes what we build.

The group participation rate asks a different question: “Of the people who came, how many of them are known?” Known by name in a smaller setting. Known well enough that someone would notice if they disappeared for two weeks.

That shift in question changes what you see when you look at your church.

How to pull this report from what you already have

You probably don’t need new software for this. Most ChMS platforms already hold the data. The issue is usually that no one has thought to cross-reference it this way.

In Planning Center, the Groups module tracks what they call “health stats,” which includes your church participation percentage: the share of active people in your database who are members of at least one group. They also track 90-day turnover, showing you how many people joined a group and left within three months. Both numbers together give you a clear view of whether connection is happening and whether it’s lasting.

Breeze handles this through its tags and groups system. You can filter your people list by group membership and compare it against your attendance records. Breeze’s reporting tools let you create custom attendance reports filtered by group tags, so you can see which regular attenders aren’t connected to any group, class, or team. That filtered list is the actual report that matters.

ChurchTrac tracks group attendance alongside service attendance, and their reporting tools let you see who hasn’t attended any group for a set period. The platform also flags people who’ve gone missing from groups, so no one falls through the gap between “still attending Sundays” and “quietly disengaging.”

Tithe.ly manages groups within its church management suite, allowing you to track participation and send group-level communications. If you’re using Tithe.ly for your ChMS, you can pull member lists from each group and compare them against your broader attendance data to calculate your own participation rate.

The specific steps vary, but the logic is the same everywhere: compare total regular attenders against total group participants. The number you get is your connection rate.

What the number actually reveals

When you run this report for the first time, the result is often sobering. Many churches find that fewer than 30% of their regular Sunday attenders are connected to anything beyond the weekend service. That’s not a failure of programming or leadership. It’s simply a reality that becomes visible only when you measure it.

Once you have the number, you can start tracking it over time. That trend line tells you more about the relational health of your church than almost any other metric.

A participation rate that’s climbing, even slowly, means your pathways from attendance to belonging are working. People are finding their way into groups, teams, and classes. The on-ramp exists and people are using it.

A participation rate that’s flat or declining means something different. It means people keep showing up on Sundays but aren’t going deeper. New people might be arriving, but they’re staying on the perimeter. The front door is open, but the hallway to the rest of the house isn’t clear enough to walk through.

Neither scenario is cause for panic. Both are simply information. But it’s the kind of information that changes the conversations you have with your leadership team, your small group coordinators, and yourself.

Making it practical when your church is small

If your church runs 40, 60, or 90 people on a Sunday, you might think you don’t need a report to tell you who’s connected. You see everyone. You know their names.

That instinct is understandable, but it has a blind spot. Knowing someone’s name is not the same as knowing whether they have a place where they’re known. You might greet someone warmly every Sunday for a year without realizing they haven’t had a real conversation with anyone else in the room.

Even in a church of 50, running this report creates a concrete list of people who are relationally unattached. Not a vague sense that “we should probably follow up with some folks,” but actual names. And a list of names is something you can act on this week.

For small churches, the report is often easiest to build manually. Open a spreadsheet. List your regular attenders in one column. In the next column, note which group, team, or relational circle they belong to. Leave the column blank for anyone who isn’t connected to anything smaller than your Sunday gathering.

The blank spaces are your report.

The long view

Churches are generational projects. The decisions we make about what to measure and what to prioritize today will shape our communities five, ten, twenty years from now.

When we measure attendance alone, we build churches that are good at attracting a crowd. That’s not nothing. But a crowd and a community are different things. A crowd gathers. A community holds.

The group participation rate measures the thing underneath attendance: the relational infrastructure that determines whether your church can weather the seasons that test every congregation. A pastoral transition. A building crisis. A cultural moment that divides people along lines they didn’t know existed. Churches that survive those seasons are almost never the ones with the best attendance numbers. They’re the ones where people are woven into each other’s lives tightly enough that leaving would mean losing something real.

Your ChMS already has most of the data you need. The question is whether you’re asking it the right question. Attendance asks, “Are people coming?” The group participation rate asks, “Are people staying because they belong?”

Running this report won’t fix anything by itself. It’s a diagnostic, not a treatment. But it tells you the truth about something most of our dashboards are silent on.

And the truth is where every good decision starts.