TN95 Exit interviews for everyone

These notes were first published on this website in October 2016 and last updated in September 2022

Synopsis

These notes promote the idea of exit interviews as people leave your church in the hope that such sessions might become normal practice. We need to learn from what such interviews can tell us.

After a listing of general principles for how to set up and conduct such a session, three particular cases are taken, each with a limited number of possible questions to ask (an extended tick-box approach is far from the ideal).

1. Paid staff - just what you would expect from the term 'exit interview'.
2. The Minister - the first case is now extended to the (what for many will be new) idea of interviewing a departing Minister.
3. Members of the congregation - why not have a conversation with those who leave, whether because they are moving away or because they are joining another local church or even dropping out of church membership altogether? Just don't call it an 'exit interview'!

Questions for this third group cover church strengths, their contributions, areas that need to change, any time when they were hurt or upset, things that the church might have done differently, reasons for leaving and lessons the church might learn.

I would love to hear from churches that conduct exit interviews in any of these three cases. Email me on the address at the end of these notes or as given on each website page.

These notes have been updated in September 2022 with minor amendments to the text and layout.