Earlier I said I would post some attendee data from the studies that are underway currently.  So here it is, but please remember this is incomplete and meant for this discussion only.

One question we asked megachurch attendees was had their participation changed in the past two years.  38% of attendees said it had increased while only 8% said it decreased. 
Compare this to the Parish Inventory findings we have gathered from mostly mainline churches - much smaller and usually not growing.... data found at http://hirr.hartsem.edu/leadership/total.pdf
on average for the 84 churches 30% of attendees had increased their involvement while 24% had decreased their interactions with the church.
What would your attendees say about their participation?

Another fascinating finding is that of the roughly 20,000 attendees from the 9 churches so far - 12% say they consider the church their "church home" and they also attend other churches at the same time!   An equal number (12%) were attending the megachurches but do not consider them their church home.  This really contradicts our I think implicit assumptions about belonging to one church and being a faithful member of that one church until we move our membership... think of the potential confusion when a researcher asks someone - where do you attend? and where are you a member?

One of the best predictors of church growth - as I said in the workshop - was how involved the church's attendees were in inviting people to church.  In the megachurch data only 13% of attendees didn't invite anyone in the past year whereas in the Parish Inventory data 45% of folks didn't invite anyone to church.  For the mega attenders 60% invited 4 or more people in the last year but just 10% of the Inventory churches invited that many.

Finally, for now, I asked Do you agree or disagree with the statement "I have a strong sense of belonging to this congregation." 

For the Inventory churches the results were:
Strongly                                               Strongly
Agree           Agree         Disagree        Disagree
41                  44               12                     3

and for the megachurch attendees:
Strongly                                               Strongly
Agree           Agree         Disagree        Disagree
41                  46                 9                     4

Surprised?  Clearly the new megachurch attender data - once it is all complete - will give me many things to think about.  I expect it to challenge much of what I think is going on at megachurches but also reinforce the point that there are great things happening at all sizes of churches.

I'm still lingering if anyone has questions and will continue to check in throughout the weekend.

Scott