5 meaningful contacts with Christians before considering the claims of the gospel I've been reading a book on Church growth (Growing A Healthy Church by Dan Spader and Gary Mayes) with a chapter on evangelism that says something which I've heard in churches before:

&quot;Typically an unbeliever needs to have more than five meaningful contacts with a number of Christians before he or she will begin to trust the message of the gospel

Growing a Healthy Church
This seems to be a linchpin point supporting relationship-style evangelism but the book doesn't cite any sources and I don't seem to be able to find any myself. Can someone else locate the source of this claim whether it be a study or merely an idea proposed by someone else?
In marketing, this is referred to as the number of &quot;touches&quot; required to make a sale or convince someone. It is not unique to religion, nor does it guarantee success. In marketing, this is called &quot;funneling&quot;:

In fact, this approach only works on a small subset (typically a one-digit percentage) of the number of contacts.
The number of touches documented in market research is usually 6 to 8, which corresponds to  &quot;more than five meaningful contacts&quot; in the question posted.