to increase church attendance?

Find your churches target audience and what needs your church is not meeting. Look at successful churches and try to model your programs after theirs. Example: Maybe people love churches that take tything to feed the needy. Or take kids hiking church youth group. Keep in mind you need to figure that out for your church. In addition, I've sited some of those details bellow.

FANTASTIC POST BY PANCHO Wow if xtians would act upon what he has stated then I might not be an atheist. I really want to drive the point home an "ice cream social" ARE YOU SERIOUS! Yes you are that is why attendance is down! Their is a world of hurting people out there. Do you people care NO you are more concerned about acting all pious because you have a big church and you never miss a sunday. You people could care less about your fellow man. When was the last time you reached out and actually helped someone instead of the usual "I'll pray for you"? Do you expect god is going to send someone else to help the hurt that stand in front of you? Because your prayers mean NOTHING to someone who is pain. ACTION would lead people back to the church they would want to be good and be with others that want to be good. As it is now most of us think of you people as a bunch of narcissists that want to kiss the pastors backside to prove that you are such a great xtian. Since you probably were not thinking of that kind of thing as it would require real effort I will tell you what fills the church for a night anyway. Here in the south they seem to like having a fish fry. That is more along the lines you were thinking of. NO?

Youth meetings that included dramas, quizzes and prizes; inviting famous preachers but most importantly, the pastor prayed. Have you asked the Lord why this sudden decrease in attendance happened? Nothing can substitute prayer. Also, has there been any rumors circulating about the pastor/priest or the deacons?

Get the people in the congregation involved in the community. Churches have always been about community, so start using the community center, the parks, and any city group activities to your advantage.

Try capturing some homosexuals and broadcast your success in curing them.

Rid your city of Demons through 24 hour prayer services at town hall.

Trick atheists with free pizza and loose girls on street corners in attending orgies in the church basement.

The kingdom of God has NEVER been about stuffing as many people as possible within the four walls of a church

Boosting attendance is meaningless because "going to church" is nothing more than a social function. The real purpose of religion is to show people how to achieve communion with God - but in the Christian traditions, this is no longer understood. The clergy are ignorant of such things and simply preach about morality, and not infrequently, about politics. I am not an atheist, but i stopped going to church when I was 16 because it no longer meant anything. I stood there in the Catholic church we had been attending and suddenly it all seemed so useless, so meaningless. We were standing there listening to some man in a costume mumbling something in Latin, then holding up a round piece of bread, then more words, then he sipped some wine, and that was supposed to be spiritually uplifting. It was not. It was just a ritual, a habit people had gotten into but it didn't bring us closer to God. Going to church isn't "worship." Jesus told people to "go into their closets," meaning into a private place, not only physically, but within themselves, to pray to God. The fact that you tried an "ice cream social" shows how useless, meaningless, and thoroughly irrelevant Christianity has become. It's disconnected from real religious practice, having become nothing more than lectures, dead rituals, men in costumes, and large buildings with colorful windows. No one is going to get to God that way. If i were you, I'd be far less concerned about "boosting attendance" and much more concerned with learning how to commune with The Divine, which is the entire point of real religion. Christianity is, of course, a dead tradition or dead set of traditions all caught up in drama & dogma, and though the ministers & priests continue to preach, they themselves are not spiritually enlightened people, so how can they help their parishioners? Jesus Himself said that the blind cannot lead the blind because if they try, they will both fall into the ditch. Christianity is that "ditch" and there are millions of Christians living in it, being quite content, naively assuming that they will be with God based solely on the fact that they belong to a church congregation. But - did Jesus teach that? NO! He did not. You need to re-think the entire matter of religion and what it means because what you describe in your post is a perfect example of how Christianity degenerated over the centuries and finally died. Yes, many still cling to it out of fear of "hell," but none of those people are getting to God, and yelling, "We're going to Heaven!" doesn't make it true. There is far more to getting to God than going to stand in a building (church) for an hour or so once a week. And if attendance is down, it's because the churches aren't giving the parishioners anything anymore; they no longer are able to show them how to achieve union with God. All they give them is, as I already stated, drama & dogma, and they, like myself, have grown tired of that - it isn't giving them anything and bribing them with ice cream is silly. To repeat: It just shows that Christianity has run out of ideas, based on its own disconnection from the original teachings. Jesus would be very sad to see what has happened to the organizations that claim to be following Him ...

A drop in Church attendance is a good thing.

2 Chronicles 30

http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=2Ch&c=3...

Good advertisement helps. Like fliers and pamphlet etc.