Written forpastors and supervisors of cell-based churches
This week a pastor told me he was going to cancel his church's subscription to the app.
It was not the price, it was not a missing feature and it was not the support. They were not moving to another product.
So why stop using it?
He said it plainly: the leaders were not filling in the report.
They opened the app once a week, took the lesson, and closed it.
If you lead a cell-based church, you have probably lived some version of this.
But why does this happen?
It happens when they see that filling it in or not changes nothing. It is not about the app being easy or hard, and it is not a lack of willingness on their part.
For reports to arrive week after week, a church has to do three things:
- Explain the purposeTell the leader how the church uses that information in pastoral care.
- Give something backSend them something useful about their own cell group that they had not noticed yet.
- Show careBefore asking for the report, care about the leader's life.
Chasing harder solves none of the three.
The problem is neither the app nor the leaders
When attendance is not recorded the way the church wants it to be, the first explanation that comes to mind is usually one of these two:
- The app is too complicated.
- The leaders never adapted to it.
But there is only one truth here! Both explanations fall short, and it is not hard to see why.
Notice that the two have something in common: they hand the responsibility to someone else.
In one, the tool is to blame. In the other, the leader is.
And there is enough research to show why neither is enough.
In 1989, a researcher named Fred Davis published a study that became the basis of everything written afterwards about why people use, or do not use, a tool at work.
It became known as TAM, the Technology Acceptance Model. He separated two things we tend to mix up.
- How easy the tool is to use.
- How useful it is to the person using it.
Following more than a hundred employees of a large company, Davis found a strong relationship between how useful the tool was seen to be and how much it was used.
Ease mattered too, but part of its effect ran through usefulness: it weighs while it makes the tool more useful, and on its own it barely moves the use at all.
His conclusion was blunt: no amount of ease makes up for a tool that does nothing useful for the person using it.
That is where the first explanation loses its footing. No tool starts being used just because it is easy, and no degree of simplicity fixes that on its own.
Thirty-four years later, two researchers set out to study something else: why volunteers keep serving in an organization, or stop.
They surveyed 323 people.
What best predicted that a volunteer would stay was having received proper training. Right after it came feeling welcomed.
Making the process easy predicted nothing. Neither an easy sign-up nor tidy logistics kept anyone.
The parallel in a church is not the app. It is the belief that reducing the leader's workload is enough for them to carry on.
And here the word training deserves care, because it misleads.
It is not training on how to use the tool, the kind that teaches where to click. It is training on purpose, on the vision: the person understanding what that thing does in someone's life.
A good app makes training on use unnecessary. No app makes training on purpose unnecessary.
One finding is striking. Among the open answers, 13% of the volunteers asked for the same thing: that the team knew their name and greeted them.
That is where the second loses its footing. A volunteer does not "adapt" on their own, and does not fail to adapt on their own either. What decides whether they stay is how the organization treats them.
Hold on to what the volunteers asked for, that someone would know their name. It comes back in a moment.
Two studies. Different fields. Three decades apart.
Brought into our world, both point to the same place: it is neither the tool nor the leader. It is how the church acts.
The same week, seen from three places
Leave the theory and look at how this actually plays out.
The cell group meets at 8pm, at someone's home. It ends at 10pm. The conversation carries on at the door until almost 11pm, because one of the people in the group was going through something and nobody wanted to leave first.
He gets home after 11pm, goes to bed later still, and works the next day.
The next day, in the middle of his workday, he remembers the report. He does not open it. The day after, he forgets.
She opens the dashboard and sees the groups with an overdue report.
She also has a job, and looks after several cell groups. She is not going to reach out to each of them right then.
So she sends a message to the group chat: "everyone, don't forget to submit the report."
One or two reply. When she comes back to check, several reports are still missing.
He wants to know whether the vision God put in his heart is being reached, and for that he needs to know how many visitors the church welcomed in the cell groups, whether people are taking courses and joining events, whether they are being discipled.
But the numbers are wrong, because half of the groups never submitted. He looks at that and concludes the app is not working.
Notice that nobody did anything wrong
The leader put first the person who was struggling, which is exactly what we ask leaders to do.
The supervisor looks after several leaders, has a family and a job, and sent the reminder she was able to send.
The pastor looked at the number he had in front of him.
Each of them acted reasonably. And the result is an empty report.
That is why chasing harder does not work. The problem is in none of the three people. It is in what happens between them.
What the leader learns from all this
He finds out what the report is for by what the church does when it does not arrive.
Look at the last two.
They seem opposite, and they are the same thing. In one, the whole relationship is the report. In the other there is no relationship at all, and the leader submits into a void.
The message in the group chat, the "everyone, don't forget" one, lands on the third row. It is for everybody, and it is for nobody.
And here comes the uncomfortable part.
In a church where nobody looks at the report, the leader who does not fill it in is right.
He read the situation and acted on what he saw. It is not laziness. It is a conclusion.
In a company, management decides and the employee uses a given tool because it is part of the work they are paid for.
A cell group leader is not an employee.
I looked for research on this exact case: a task the organization asks for, does not pay for, and cannot enforce. I did not find any. The research knows both extremes, and the church lives in the middle.
That is why copying corporate logic does not work here. The principles have to be brought into the reality of a Christian community.
Six questions to find out why the report does not arrive
The two studies in the previous section point to three things, not to six loose problems.
They are the three from the top of this text: explain the purpose, give something back and show care. The leader needs to know:
- That the report helps the church fulfill its mission.
- That the time he spent filling it in made the church notice something.
- That the leadership sees him as a person, not as someone who fills in a form.
Two questions for each. None of them depends on an app, and all six can be answered this week.
Find out how many leaders submitted last week's meeting without anyone asking.
Does the leader know what it is for?
A notice in the group chat does not count. Training on how to use the app does not either. The question is whether someone sat down and said what it is for.
Leadership that never opens it teaches, without saying a word, that it does not matter.
Does the leader get anything in return?
If there is only one, that screen is the diagnosis. For the pastor who opened this text, it was the weekly lesson. That is no coincidence: the lesson is the only thing there that gives the leader something. Everything else asks.
If the answer is no, you have leaders who give and never receive. That is exactly how a record turns into a demand.
Does anyone there know who he is?
Reach out to the leader, not to the group. If the answer is "nobody does", you already know what he concluded.
Does it ask about the leader, or does it ask for the number? This is the most important of the six. And it is the only one nobody measures.
How to read the result
Count the "no" answers in each measure.
Two of them in the same measure is where your problem is, and that is where to start. A church with a problem in measure 3 fixes nothing by improving training, and the other way around holds too.
If all three come out negative, start with the first. The other two depend on it.
What to do this week when the reports do not arrive
In 2017, the late pastor Pedro Filho, of Ministério Semente de Fé, a church in Parnamirim, in northeastern Brazil, told our podcast how his church started receiving the reports on time, week after week.
He did not change tools. And he did ask for the reports, in plain words. What he did not do was turn that into a threat. In his own words (the interview was in Portuguese):
“When I ask for it, it is not about framing the tool as something negative, it is about framing it as something necessary.”
He did three things.
He tied the record to something the leader already wanted for himself.
He taught that keeping that information up to date was part of a leader's excellence.
And he summed up what he wanted from them in two phrases: not “filling it in to get it over with”, but “filling it in to get something out of it”.
The report stopped being a favor to the church office and became evidence of the kind of leader he is.
That is exactly the training on purpose from the previous section. It is not teaching people where to click. It is explaining what it is for.
He used the app himself, and the leaders knew it.
And he closed the loop every week. On Monday he looked at which groups were out of date and passed it on to his main leaders, so that they would update it or reach out to theirs.
But here is the detail that decides everything. And it is where most churches go wrong when they copy this routine.
Checking every Monday, on its own, is surveillance.
What changes the meaning is not how often you check. It is the first sentence of whoever reaches out to the leader afterwards.
Remember what the volunteers asked for? This is it.
What separates support from pressure is what happens after someone notices.
Three things to do, one per measure, and none of them depends on a tool:
A leaders' meeting where you explain what the church does with that information.
It does not have to be a polished report. The leader only needs to see that what he writes down is read and matters. A voice message will do.
When you reach out, do not open with the report. Life on life first. The numbers follow.
And a fourth one, which takes weight off without taking responsibility away: let the leader delegate the record to an assistant leader or to someone in the group when he has no time. It works with an app, with a spreadsheet and with a notebook.
So the app does not matter?
It does, and it would be dishonest of me to say otherwise right now.
A hard tool adds friction. One that gives nothing back lowers the value the leader sees in it. And one that never shows the supervisor who fell behind lets the problem grow unseen.
What the research says is something else: none of those functions replaces what only the church can do.
I will be straight, because this text is published by the people who sell the product: it solves none of the three things listed above.
What it does is make the fourth question possible without manual work. And show who has not submitted before it becomes a problem, so that someone reaches the leader in time.
Pedro Filho's church solved this without changing a single line of the tool.
The conversation is still yours to have.
The report is not about the report
Every leader who fills it in is saying something about people.
Who came. Who disappeared. Who showed up for the first time.
When nobody does anything with it, he stops saying it.
And it is not the data that is lost. It is the chance for someone to notice, in time, that a person stopped showing up.
A report with nothing coming back becomes a demand. What comes back turns the leader's work into care.
References
(1989). Perceived Usefulness, Perceived Ease of Use, and User Acceptance of Information Technology. MIS Quarterly, 13(3), 319-340. DOI 10.2307/249008. paywalled
(2023). Unpacking the Volunteer Experience: The Influence of Volunteer Management on Retention and Promotion of the Organization. Journal of Public and Nonprofit Affairs, 9(3). Read the study open access
(2017). A culture of excellence in cell-based churches. célula.in podcast, September 2017. Listen to the episode open access
This article is revised whenever a figure or a practice it cites changes. When that happens, the revision date appears next to the publication date.