Sometimers: Engaging Competing Priorities
The Wrong Instinct
When a church notices a Column One Sometimer — someone whose absence is about attention, not access — the instinct is usually to reach for something big. A personal meeting with a pastor. A direct conversation about commitment. An invitation to a significant, weighty next step. The thinking makes sense on the surface: if this person's priorities have drifted, surely a big, serious gesture is what it takes to reset them.
In practice, this instinct usually backfires. A big ask aimed at someone who's currently giving the church a small amount of their attention rarely lands as an invitation — it lands as pressure, and pressure is exactly the kind of thing competing priorities are already winning against. If a two-hour weekend commitment is losing to a Sunday morning sports league or an extra shift at work, asking for an even bigger commitment isn't going to out-compete what's already winning. You need a different kind of tool for this specific problem, and it isn't a bigger ask. It's a different shape of ask entirely.
Why the Big Ask Fails This Type Specifically
It's worth being precise about the mechanism here, because it explains why the same big-ask approach that might work for someone in crisis fails so consistently for this type. A big ask requires the person to first decide that church deserves a large, immediate reprioritization of their time and attention — essentially asking them to solve the whole problem in one decision, before any relationship has been rebuilt to make that decision feel worth making. That's a lot to ask of someone whose relationship to the church has quietly thinned. It's also a lot of pressure to put on a single conversation or invitation: if it doesn't land, there's often no natural follow-up, because a big ask that gets a "not right now" tends to end the conversation rather than open another door.
There's also a trust problem underneath this. Someone who's drifted toward other priorities usually hasn't consciously rejected the church — they've just stopped experiencing it as something worth reordering their week around. A big ask assumes the trust and motivation for a large commitment are still fully intact and simply need to be activated. Often, they're not intact at all; they've quietly eroded along with the attendance, and a big ask built on a foundation that isn't there yet is likely to fall through it.
Think Velcro, Not Rope
Here's the image worth holding onto for this entire lesson: velcro instead of rope. A single strand of rope, thick and strong, can hold a lot of weight — but it takes real effort to tie, and if it snaps, everything it was holding falls at once. Velcro works completely differently. One small hook holds almost nothing on its own. But dozens of tiny hooks, each individually weak, combine into something that holds remarkably well — and if a few of them let go, the whole thing doesn't fail.
That's exactly the dynamic at play with a Competing Priorities Sometimer. You're not going to re-anchor their life with one strong pull. You're going to re-anchor it with several small points of connection that, individually, don't look like much, but together create a hold strong enough to compete with whatever else is currently pulling harder. This reframes the whole strategy: instead of asking "what's the one thing that will bring them back," the better question is "what are five small things that could each catch a little bit of their attention."
What Small Connection Points Actually Look Like
The word "small" matters here as much as the word "connection." These aren't scaled-down versions of a big commitment — they're genuinely low-cost, low-barrier touchpoints that ask very little up front. It helps to think of them in a few categories, since different hooks catch different people.
Relational, no-agenda touches. A text from someone in their friend group, not a staff member, just checking in without an agenda — "thought of you today, hope work's been manageable." A birthday remembered and acknowledged specifically, not through an automated system. A short voice memo instead of a text, which takes almost no extra effort to send but lands with noticeably more warmth. None of these ask anything of the person receiving them. That's exactly why they work as a hook.
Single-occasion invitations. Not "come to church," but "come to this one thing, this one time" — a men's breakfast that happens once a quarter, a specific worship night, a one-off service project on a Saturday morning, a watch party for something unrelated to a typical service. The defining feature is that it has a clear beginning and end, so saying yes doesn't feel like the first step onto an escalator they can't get off.
Micro-gatherings. A short, informal gathering with two or three others rather than a full small group commitment — coffee with one other couple, a lunch after service with no agenda beyond conversation, a thirty-minute walk with a neighbor from church. These carry real relational weight without the calendar commitment of a weekly group, which is often the exact barrier keeping a Competing Priorities Sometimer from saying yes to anything more structured.
Shared-interest connections. A hobby or activity link with someone else in the church, entirely unrelated to any official program — a fantasy football group, a book club, a running partner, a shared interest in woodworking or gardening. These work because they don't feel like church outreach at all; they feel like ordinary friendship, which is often the most durable hook of all, since it doesn't depend on the person's relationship to the institution improving before the relationship itself can grow.
In-the-moment presence. A brief, genuine conversation after service on one of the Sundays they do show up — one that makes that particular visit memorable instead of anonymous. This costs nothing to arrange in advance, but it's easy to miss if no one's specifically watching for the Sometimer who did make it in this week.
None of these, alone, would meaningfully change someone's trajectory. That's the point. They're not meant to.
Why Stacking Works Where a Single Ask Doesn't
A single hook has almost no strength because it's a single point of failure — miss that one moment, misjudge that one ask, and there's nothing else holding. Several small points of connection don't depend on any one of them succeeding. If the text goes unanswered, the event invitation might still land. If the event doesn't happen, the informal gathering might still catch their attention next month. Each small connection also compounds: someone who responds to one small invitation is measurably more likely to respond to the next one, because a little bit of trust and familiarity has already been built. Over time, five or six small points of connection can create something that functions very differently from any one of them alone — a genuine sense of belonging that starts to compete seriously with whatever's currently occupying more of their attention.
This also solves a practical problem with this specific type of Sometimer: because their absence is about priority, not access, they're often reachable in short, low-commitment moments even during a season where they wouldn't say yes to anything larger. Velcro-style engagement meets them where they actually are, instead of asking them to first clear space for something bigger before any connection can happen at all.
A Worked Example
Consider someone who's gone from attending nearly every week to appearing maybe once a month, pulled away by a demanding new job and a kid's travel sports schedule that eats most weekends. A big ask — a sit-down conversation about recommitting to church — would likely be met with polite deflection, not because they don't care, but because the ask doesn't fit the actual shape of their life right now. Instead, over six weeks: a friend from the church texts them about the job, unprompted. They get invited to a one-time Saturday morning service project that happens to not conflict with a game that particular weekend. Someone remembers their kid's tournament schedule and asks how it went. They're invited to a two-person lunch with someone who shares their interest in woodworking. None of these four things, alone, brought them back to weekly attendance. Together, they meant that by the time an invitation to a short-term group came up, it wasn't a cold ask — it was the natural next hook in a pattern of connection that was already holding.
Applying the Last Section's Work Here
This connects directly to the connection points built in the Regular Attenders section. Those same structures — small groups, one-time gatherings, informal touchpoints — are exactly the raw material for this strategy. The difference here is intent and framing: for a Competing Priorities Sometimer, the goal isn't necessarily to get them fully embedded in one connection point right away. It's to layer several light touches from multiple sources, so that no single relationship or invitation is carrying the entire weight of pulling them back in.
Exercise:
Pick one Column One Sometimer and list five small, low-barrier ways someone could connect with them this month — not one big plan, five small ones.
Recruit help outside of staff. Identify a friend or peer of that person who could send one genuine, no-agenda check-in text this week.
Find one specific, single event — not a general invitation to church — you could personally invite them to attend, framed as a one-time thing rather than a commitment.
Notice and use their good Sundays. The next time this person does show up, have one real, specific conversation with them instead of a passing greeting.
Track the small connections, not just attendance. Start a simple log of the light touches this person receives over the next month, so you can see the velcro building rather than only watching for the next time they show up.
