Several years ago when I was pastoring a suburban Atlanta church, we wanted to reach our community. Like a lot of churches, our advertising budget was limited, but we wanted to make an impact. We ruled out direct mail — too expensive. TV, ditto. But we came up with an inexpensive and effective plan that accomplished our goal.
About 4-weeks before Easter, we designed and printed 1,000 invitations to our three Easter worship services. The invitations were simple, one-color folded notecards printed on the front only. Plain envelopes, without the church return address were purchased for the cards.
We bagged the cards and envelopes in groups of ten. One Sunday morning we put all 100 bags of cards on the front pew and asked each member household to take a bag-of-10-cards. Each family sent invitations to 10 individuals or families they knew, with a personal handwritten note inside each card. Families provided their own stamps, saving the church the cost of postage.
Each family was also encouraged to follow-up their invitations with a phone call to their potential guest, inviting them personally to worship with us on Easter. Our members offered to pick up their guests or meet them at the church, and sit with them during worship.
I encourage you to read the whole article to find out what the results were. Studies have consistently shown (along with personal experience) that the best way by far of increasing attendance and membership is to have members invite their friends in an intentional loving way.
Continuing with our Easter theme, below is a video that teaches how to make Resurrection Eggs and teach an Easter lesson from them. This is a good Sunday School or Children’s program craft or even something you can do at home.
In most churches their biggest turnout of the year is for Easter Sunday. This doesn’t happen by accident-churches pour time, money, and resources into their church communications prior to Easter and it pays off with a full-sanctuary for multiple services. However, few churches have a continuing increase in attendance after Easter.
Easter week may have been fantastic, but without intentionally working on developing a continuing relationship with the people who only come at this time of year, we aren’t communicating the total message of Easter. Jesus came to earth, died on the cross, and rose from the grave to enable us to have an eternal relationship with him, not just a yearly visit to his church.
For the Easter activities of your church to build relationships, you may need to expand your goals in the communications you create for this time of year.
Author Yvon Prehn goes on to say that we must make Easter a connecting point and not an end result by focusing on two types of communications. First, we need communications that introduce people to Jesus and second, we need communications that introduce people to our church and the ministries of our church.
She gives lots of helpful tips and strategies on how to do this and I encourage you to read the whole article by clicking the link above. Hopefully, we can incorporate some of these ideas into our Easter services this year.
Many of you heard about this story some time ago, but it gets me every time. For those of you that aren’t familiar with Jason McElway and his basketball story, get ready to be inspired.
Looking out for Mr. Cranky. Hasn’t every church had something proposed and found that a vast majority of the people, if not excited about the proposal, are at least willing to give it a try? Then someone begins to complain. They complain and gather a couple more complainers into their corner. Suddenly, a perfectly good ministry is stopped in tis tracks because a vocal minority is against it. The i rules because we don’t want to make anyone angry (20).
These guardians have several methods of controlling the direction of the church. As must as we hate to face it, many of these methods are unhealthy. Acceptance of such behavior by others in the church is why many church systems are dysfunctional. These behaviors are unhealthy: temper tantrums, threats to withhold financial support, leaving the church and trying to influence as many as possible to come with them, gathering allies and attacking (usually just verbally) those who disagree with them, and demanding that the pastor resign. Such behavior must not be tolerated. It must be confronted and named. In fact, willingness to confront negative, unhealthy behavior in the church is a sign of leadership (21).
Sometimes some people need to leave. If you plan to have everyone in the church get excited about the idea of the church being revitalized and transformed, but you don’t plan to really do anything until everyone gets on board with the plan, forget it (23-24).
Conflict is mentioned often in this book because it always accompanies transformation. Some conflict surround every change…and I’m not convinced that’s all bad (24-25).
Jay Dozier, another DOC pastor, says, “Any change will cause conflict with humans. Given 100 people, any change will make some of ‘em stinkin’ mad. And when they get mad, they will attack their leadership. And at that point, the response is not to ameliorate, but to stand even firmer. If anything, the leaders of the church must understand themselves as conflict initiators. If we’re looking for church transformation, then I presume that something needs to be changed (27).
If we are really paying attention, we start to realize that the church exists, not to meet my needs and the needs of my family, but to reach out to those who don’t know God and to help connect them to God. It begins to dawn on us that church is not primarily for us (31).
As difficult as it is for some, we must decide that church is not all about taking care of me and mine, but is about reaching others with the message of Christ. A sure sign that a church is dying is the presence of conflict over the personal preferences of the members. And a sure sign a church is healthy is the presence of large numbers of members excited about doing ministry and missions (50).
In an attempt to clear out a backlog of clippings I have “saved” for later posting on the SHINE Blog, I’m going to try to post some of them in the next few weeks. These are just things that I have run across in my surfing or reading and wanted to share.
Today we have two related questions from different sites: What are parents wanting in a church and what unchurched young people want from a church.
I believe a greater percentage of parents are looking to find a church that meets both their needs and their kids needs.
Each parent has their own mix of “wants,” but here is a list of things that every parent seems to like:
A children’s ministry that makes their kids feel loved.
A children’s ministry and church with good security.
A children’s ministry that effectively teaches their kids valuable lessons.
A children’s ministry that is fun and “wows” their kids.
A friendly church.
A church with good preaching.
A church with good worship.
A church that makes it easy to make friends.
A church that offers opportunities to get involved.
I encourage you to read the whole post by clicking the link above and make sure you read the comments after the post as well. Pretty interesting discussion about what the focus ought to be.
63% of young adults said they would attend a church if that church “presented truth to me in an understandable way that relates to my life now.”
15% of the younger unchurched attended church weekly as a child and have no current
animosity toward the church, yet 37% are hostile toward the church and Christians.
Four out of 5 unchurched adults aged 20 to 29 in the U.S. believe a supreme being exists. Though they are not attending church, 3 out of 4 claim the existence of God does or would impact their lives, but this does not seem to translate into involvement in a church.
Nearly three-quarters express some level of agreement that the Christian church is generally helpful to society. Young unchurched African-Americans agree more than others (25% to 7%) that the church is the only place to learn what it means to be Christian. (Lost and Found, Stetzer, Stanley and Hayes, B&H Publishing Group 2009)
In light of the recent tragic shooting of pastor Fred Winters of First Baptist Church, Maryville, Illinois on March 8th and some other recent high profile church shootings, many churches have begun to be more “security-conscious.” Along those lines, here is an article I ran across from the Baptist Press by David Roach.
Although I disagree with the general rule put forth in the article that a pastor should seek cover everytime a person unexpectedly approaches the platform during a service, it is a good idea to start thinking in terms of what security issues we face at Glenwood Presbyterian and how we might address them better.
Right now, we don’t have a worship service during the evening like we used to, so we don’t have to worry as much about our young people playing outside after dark, but there are still a great number of security issues facing us.
What are your thoughts? Any ideas for increasing our security? Is there a way to do so while still maintaining a feeling of welcome and hospitality to outsiders?
Our Pastor Search committee will hopefully be formed in the next few months (we have to complete our “Mission Study” first) and when they are, they would probably do well to consider some of the ideas in these two articles.
Second, this blog article tells us that there are Five Kinds of Pastors as far as leadership styles. For what it’s worth, I’d vote for the “Cultivating Pastor.”
It’s been one of those weeks where I didn’t think I would be that busy and so I planned to do a lot of creative things like redesigning the church’s webpage, but God had other plans and work kept piling up, so here are a few articles and thoughts as we go into the weekend…
Adam and Eve had the perfect marriage. Here’s why.
Here’s a sweet story about Charles Spurgeon and his wife.
Finally, two articles that hit a little too close to home (or church, I guess). A review of the bookSimple Church and some similar ideas about Busyness as usual in the church.
It’s going to be a fun weekend – the Glenwood Gladiators play softball tonight at Old Peck Field at 9:30pm (which is past my bedtime – someone wake me when it’s my turn to hit). In addition to that, our SHINE contemporary worship service turns one year old this Sunday night! I’ll try to post on this later.
Since my wife complained that I had too many articles in my last collection post, I figured I would post them more frequently. These are articles that I read that stick out to me, so I favorite them and post them when I get around to it…
A Michigan church filed a federal lawsuit after police officers, led by a local prosecutor, entered the sanctuary at least twice without a warrant alleging the church’s music was too loud and, in one instance, threatened to arrest church musicians for disorderly conduct.
Every Sunday morning, Bradley J. Hales stands in front of Reformation Lutheran Church , Culpeper, Va., and waves to passing cars on Main Street—outreach with interesting results.
The Barna Group Looks At Tithing Ignore the paragraph that starts, “Strangely, tithing is a Jewish practice, not a Christian principle espoused in the New Testament.” Otherwise, some pretty interesting statistics.
Sometimes The Simplest Outreach Ideas Are The Best – Part Two: I plan to use this one at Glenwood sometime this year. Thanks for sharing, Chuck!
