Is "Monthly" the new "Weekly"?

Our Worship planning team decided we would track the number of individuals who attended church over the course of a month. How did we do this? Easy. We passed a clipboard during the announcements and requested people simply to write their names and those of any family members who were actually physically present on that Sunday. We were motivated by a pretty well-informed hunch that part of the decline in Sunday attendance is that people are just coming to church less often than they used to.

In May, 387 people came to church at least once. In October, 399 people came to church, but this time, our hard-working secretary Rosemary broke these numbers down according to frequency. Here's what we found.

13.7% of that 399 people came to church all four Sundays.
20.6% came three Sundays.
25.2% came two Sundays.
And 41% came one Sunday.

In other words, of the basically 400 people who attended a service during October, two-thirds came once or twice.

I don't know about you, but I think a church with 400 people coming through the doors in a month is a pretty healthy church. Our challenge is to find ways to a) increase that 400 to, say, 500; and, more importantly, b) to change the once-a-monthers to more regular attenders.

And I know, I know, numbers aren't everything. But they aren't nothing either. One element of maintaining congregational health is to nurture regular worship attendance. We're working on how to do that. Comments and suggestions gratefully received.