Today, when someone visits your church, it is likely they have already formed their first impression of your congregation from their online search. Congregations need to put their best foot forward on their web sites.
Here’s a list of questions to consider: (This list was derived from our visits to 32 churches in the last 14 months.)
Is service information easy to find?
It should be boldly displayed on the home page.
Is the service time correct?
Ten percent of the churches we visited had wrong times listed on their web sites.
Is parking available in a lot or on the street? What buses or trains are nearby? Some congregations we visited had information printed in their church bulletin that parking was available at neighboring businesses. Too late!
Is the entrance they are to use obvious? We had trouble figuring which door to use on occasion.
Is the phone number you want people to call prominently displayed? Adding office hours and the name of the person likely to answer is also helpful. It puts a face on your community. For example: For more information about our services, call Lois at the church (555) 321-5432, weekdays between or 9 am and 1 pm. Our answering machine provides basic information 24/7.
Can web viewers ask questions online (email or Facebook) and be assured of an answer within 24 hours? People expect this these days!
Is there a warm welcome from church leaders (clergy and lay) with photos and a little background? Visitors will recognize leaders when they visit and have some information to ease conversation. You might even give visitors a prompt such as “When you visit, ask for Gus or Mary. They’ll be glad to give you a tour.”
Is there a date for the last update of the site? Many sites we visited had not been updated in years, even listing pastors who had left long before. Timely updates reveal that your church is on their toes.
Is new information prominent with older information archived?
Old information is fun and can show your congregation’s personality, but the first images and information should be about the immediate future or very recent past.
Is there time for fellowship before church or after church? If visitors want to mix and meet your members they need to know if they should arrive early or plan to stay later. Invite them to fellowship. At several of the churches we visited, the congregation disappeared quickly after worship to a side room or basement area for fellowship without announcing fellowship or inviting visitors.
How long is your service expected to be? We encountered several services that were two or three hours long. Visitors need to know if a service is expected to be more than an hour long.
Is your service contemporary, liturgical, multicultural, or multilingual?
Are there helpful details about your next service? Will communion be offered? Is it a special Sunday? Will there be a blessing of pets or a baptism/confirmation? One church we visited was having a special meeting to call a pastor. Our visit seemed intrusive and we left.
Is child care available? Not everyone is comfortable leaving a child in a nursery with people they don’t know. Will their children be welcome in worship?
Will there be a children’s sermon? Families may like to know.
Engage your potential visitors from the start. Give a teaser. Ask a question that will be answered in the sermon!
Most churches have a set of standing committees which look something like this: Worship, Property, Social Ministry, Finance, Education, Stewardship and Evangelism.
In today’s church environment the Evangelism Committee can play a huge role in shaping the future of any congregation. Once the realm of church newsletters, the modern Evangelism Committee must embrace Social Media. The potential is too enormous to be overlooked — so great that it should be the hub of any congregational plan for growth.
First, consider changing the name of the committee to Social Media Committee.
There is nothing wrong with the word “evangelism,” but calling it a Social Media Committee will force you to see “evangelism” in a new light.
Social Media used correctly and DAILY is powerful. Look at it this way: A small congregation could go on reaching the same 25-75 people week after week, or it could start to reach thousands with the same message on the internet.
Here is a short list of how a Social Media Committee can spur your congregation’s ministry.
1. Using Social Media will give your congregation visibility, especially if you look beyond your own circle of activity and begin to interact with other neighborhood groups.
2. Using Social Media will give people a way to interact and share. The internet crosses religious and denominational lines. Invite people to share. Soon you’ll be engaging people who would never walk through your door on Sunday morning.
3. Social Media is cost-effective. The traditional costs of printing and mailing can be nearly eliminated. The costs of Social Media are more time intensive. Content must be created and your various social media accounts must be monitored, but this is work that can be shared.
4. Using Social Media will force your congregation to stop relying on programs that require people to come to you. It’s called OUTREACH.
5. Social Media will grow your network of people with skills and talents. You will discover influential people and you may be able to enlist them in projects. Ask a local authority to comment on an important issues that your church should address (bullying, crime, child care issues, etc.). Invite guest pastors to contribute.
6. Social Media will open eyes! Change (which most congregations admit they need) will be within reach. You will have a new arsenal of tools.
7. Social Media will open hearts as you expand your congregation’s reach in the world. If you engage in online communities on topics of interest to people in your congregation, you may be astounded to find help in places you never dreamed. Your congregation might learn about a situation your people could address and form networks far beyond what was once possible.
8. Social Media will force your congregation to work as a team. One person cannot do the job alone. Every other committee will have a message they need to share. A social media committee will have to work with all other committees to develop a strategy for each of them.
9. Social Media provides measurable results which can help you shape ministry. Increasingly sophisticated metrics (many of them free) can tell you who is reading your blog or web site, how they came to your site, what pages they look at, and how long they spend. If you offer something of value (community calendar, devotional booklet, etc.) you can collect information and expand your audience. You can tweak what is not working. What you can measure you can improve.
There is a lot to learn, but it is not difficult to get started and you can grow at a pace that is comfortable. Here is a guide to help you get started. 2×2 will start a Social Media Page to provide more help for congregations who want to harness this powerful EVANGELISM tool.
Failure to embrace social media is failure to do mission.
“Why don’t they come to us?” That’s the question many church people ask. “We’re friendly. We care about them. We have something to offer. Why don’t they come?”
One thing the last few decades have proven to the church is that people are not going to come to them like they once did. It’s not because your congregation isn’t a good group of people doing great things. It isn’t because they don’t believe in religion or the church.
It’s because today’s world provides more options to fulfill their needs — socially and spiritually.
Businesses experienced the same challenges. They knocked on doors. They advertised. They gave things away. They sponsored ball teams. Some strategies worked for a while. Along came social media. At first businesses used the internet to plug themselves shamelessly. It didn’t work very well. Then they discovered that if they provided valuable information for free on the internet, people would start coming to them. It’s not unlike the hymn –They will know we are Christians by our love. Use the internet pulpit to show your love.
Last year 2×2 visited dozens of congregations. When we choose a church, we review web sites. We learned: The internet is the most powerful resource the church is not using. Many congregations have no web site. Most have a web site that is painfully static, often not updated in years. Some have wrong information on their sites. The voice of the site, if one can be discerned at all, is usually the pastor’s, and it is rarely more than a reprinted sermon. We haven’t come across a single congregational web site that is giving people any reason to visit their site if they aren’t specifically looking for service/event times or directions. Church web sites are all about the church and not about the people they serve or hope to reach. Failing to focus on others, makes their web sites almost useless.
Reaching out to the community is evangelism. Congregations no longer have to wait until Sunday morning to send their message. Every hour, day and night, is available for you to reach your audience. The more you offer, the larger your audience grows. The more you concentrate on the needs of your customers and what’s going on in their lives and in their communities, the more successful you will be. The take away message: stop talking about yourselves and talk about what is going on in your community.
This web site is a social media project. We are a small congregation — too small to exist according to our regional body. But we do exist. We have adopted several missions. One is to harness the power of social media so that we can lead others in developing social media ministries. Mostly we concentrate on ideas that will promote ministry. We share our story only when we think it will help other congregations or illustrate an important point.
We analyze our site daily so that we can learn what works. Our little church site (only 7 months old) has an average of 75 new visits to our web site each week and has grown steadily overall every week since we began posting new information regularly. Our biggest week had 150 new visits. We have formed relationships with others involved in social media and Christian outreach. We are sharing ideas and laying the groundwork for new programs to answer the challenges which are so evident on our church visits.
Every congregation — beginning with the smallest — must embrace social media if they are to survive. 2×2 will be there to help.
The Lutheran Magazine recently reported on the hundreds of churches that have left the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America this year. At the August Synod Assembly, ELCA Secretary David Swartling reflected on the statistics, issuing a statement that smelled a bit of sour grapes. 54%, he noted, were congregations in communities of 10,000 or less.
“Given the small size of these communities, profound questions exist about the long-term viability of many of these congregations and their capacity to be effective in ministry and to develop the kind of interrelationships that they had in the ELCA.”
ELCA, wake up!
Speaking from our own experience in Southeastern Pennsylvania, small churches can no longer count on the ELCA for interrelationships or support in ministry. Small churches are being written off.
Our denomination acts as if they can continue to get away with serving as if they are the only game in town. This is most noticeable at the synodical level, but frankly, the national church has also looked the other way when small churches asked for help.
In Redeemer’s case (which you can read about elsewhere on this site), Bishop Hanson responded to Redeemer’s first request for help in our now four-year conflict with SEPA Synod by telling us of his regard for our bishop and urging both sides to negotiate. (Record of correspondence) He ignored every other letter our congregation sent to him . . as did the bishop and the rest of SEPA leadership. We understand his regard for a colleague in ministry. We do not understand why this regard translates to no regard for the people they both serve.
Small churches are frustrated with good reason. Church leadership should ask how long corporations would remain profitable if (and Redeemer experienced each of these):
The corporate office did not return phone calls. The corporate office did not respond to letters. Requests for appointments were given dates 3-5 months away–which then became 11 months. Decisions regarding local management and profitability were made with no interaction with local management. Key leadership positions went unfilled for years. Customers and clients were totally ignored but expected to eagerly embrace every new product. The workforce was asked to go through a grinding 12-18 months of interim limbo with every change of manager. Sales initiatives for each branch had to be managed by one corporate officer serving scores of branches. The manager had orders from middle management to placate workers until they grew discouraged and quit. Corporate never visited the branches unless they wanted something from them.
There was a time when congregations had no choice, but things have changed. New Lutheran denominations are emerging and time will tell if they are able to serve effectively.
More critically, small congregations now have mission opportunities outside the ELCA with organizations that pay more attention to them and are eager to work together.
If the ELCA wants to continue as an effective presence in our nation’s small towns and urban neighborhoods, they must find ways to help congregations face modern challenges. Meanwhile congregations are sending a message.
All those ELCA interrelationships — we aren’t feeling it!
In our last post we noted that Redeemer Lutheran Church in East Falls had achieved the goal of expanding multicultural ministry. The national church recognized our success, but the regional church (SEPA Synod) totally disregarded our ministry.
At the last National Assembly, the leaders of our church reported poor progress on meeting this goal nationwide. We think Redeemer’s experience can shine some light on why these goals are not being met.
There are at least three roadblocks:
1. Regional bodies are not comfortable with the goal.
There seems to be no infrastructure for implementing this major change in the denomination. When it comes to multicultural ministry, most churches and leaders are experimenting. Many of the smallest churches are strategically located in neighborhoods with the most potential for multicultural ministry, but they have the least help in achieving this important goal and may very well be on a synod’s endangered list.
Regional bodies have a tendency to cripple congregations with labels. They see congregations in terms of the past. Congregations, led by professional leaders who are familiar with those names, have a hard time ministering beyond low expectations. Regional bodies are unconsciously saying NO to the potential for multicultural outreach by failing to provide leaders for neighborhoods experiencing cultural change. Caretaker pastors will ignore the cultural changes happening all around the congregation as they hold the hands of existing members, waiting for them to die. When regional bodies lose these neighborhood outposts, they lose valuable assets for achieving their goal of multicultural ministry.
What would happen if synods approached neighborhood churches with high expectations and gave them the help they needed to reach them?
Redeemer did not set out with multicultural ministry as our objective. We just welcomed all who came to our door. This was met with resistance from SEPA leadership, who had predetermined that slow death was to be our fate.
The first Tanzanian family who came to Redeemer in 1998 asked for their two infant sons to be baptized. Bishop Almquist had declared synodical administration. We were advised to NOT baptize the children or encourage new membership. (They had NOT declared us closed but that’s what they had in mind!) The family shared only recently that a synod representative had visited them and discouraged them from joining Redeemer, which was only a few blocks from their home. “Why do you want to join a church with no black members?” they were asked. They suggested they join a church with black members several neighborhoods away.
This family joined Redeemer anyway. They were to play an important role in Redeemer’s multicultural future.
2. Pastors are not comfortable in multicultural ministry.
As this family became active, they often expressed the desire to reach out to more of the East African immigrant community. Extended family and friends began joining. One was active in social work near our church and wanted to expand outreach to nearby Hispanic neighborhoods. This ministry direction had been discussed often at council meetings with our pastors, who admitted they were not equipped to lead this type of ministry. We asked them to help us find extra help. The report was always the same. “There is no one.” Redeemer wanted to move in a direction professional leadership was unable or unwilling to take us.
Within weeks of our last pastor’s resignation, lay members had identified two qualified Lutheran pastors with roots in East African culture who were willing to visit and invite. Within a few months, Redeemer had 49 new members. During this time, SEPA leadership totally ignored us. They had no interest in helping a church they perceived as dying. When we sent a resolution to Bishop Burkat to call one of the pastors who had been working with us for seven months, she declared Redeemer closed.
3. Congregations are not comfortable with multicultural ministry.
Congregations naturally will wonder what will become of their culture if you open the door to other cultures. Redeemer faced this challenge, too.
First, we made sure that veteran members were not neglected and were active in welcoming. The church service became a bit longer with the incorporation of other languages and music, but the old membership did not have to forsake cherished traditions. Strangers were not valued more than they. God’s love grows community; it does not neglect one community to lavish attention and resources on another.
In light of these three roadblocks, the ELCA has set a goal which few people share except in theory. Here is advice from our experience on how to detour these roadblocks.
Invite.
Being invitational must be taught not just preached. Pastors often say this is the congregation’s job, but in today’s climate it must start with the pastor. The pastor must model this for the congregation, especially if a congregation has been suffering. Members will be of low morale and unable to invite. Pastors should visit, talk enthusiastically about their visits, encourage members to come along, and make sure there are quality offerings for members to promote with enthusiasm. This will rebuild invitational confidence.
Don’t cut the roots.
Popular advice from church hierarchy touts allowing churches to die so that Christian community can be “resurrected.” This is a distortion of the Resurrection message. The Bible does not advocate evicting the faithful to invite new members. As cheery as this may sound, it is cruel in practice. Time will tell if these theories have longevity or if their cited successes are flashes in the pan.
We suspect the Church will not grow if you cut the roots. If veteran members are ignored, criticized, and evicted, the neighborhood will notice. Sensitive new members will ask themselves if one day this will be their fate. Make sure that old members are part of the process of welcoming new members. Change may be desirable but keep some things the same. New members will know that they are influencing a new chapter in a long tradition.
Ministry is not multicultural if cultures never mix.
Redeemer began by offering a separate service for East Africans, but this lasted only a few months. Both “old” Redeemer and “new” Redeemer wanted to be in communion. Some congregations never move beyond this and become two congregations sharing the same building while calling it multicultural.
We faced the challenge of merging communities with FOOD.
Many churches have coffee hour. It was our observation that coffee hour does not create true fellowship. People grab their styrofoam cup and find a corner to talk to people they already know.
We began serving soup. One pasta pot of soup brought in from home will feed a small church fellowship. Easy to serve; easy to clean up. Soup encourages people to sit down together. Soup is multicultural. “Old” Redeemer tasted “banana” soup, a Tanzanian staple. A Puerto Rican vicar introduced us to sancocho beef stew — “not spicy, just tasty.” If conversation stalled, we talked about the soup, asking who made the soup and what was in the soup. Stories followed about how mother made the soup, how spices were chosen . . . and suddenly you have a proud congregation sharing traditions.
When the arts are explored, minds open.
We wanted the message that our congregation was welcoming to all cultures to be clear. It’s hard to change the stained glass windows, but we featured art and poetry from different cultures on our bulletins. We occasionally practiced the Taize traditions with icons and chants. Liturgical dance became part of our tradition. Drums were played by members sitting in the pew, but the church organ still whined away. Some of the art/music featured was traditional. We did not replace what was dear to people. We added to it.
Use the gift of language.
Foreign languages make Americans nervous. Our new members graciously recognized this and switched to English when others were present. It was a considerate, unsolicited gesture that helped create community.
In worship we alternated languages between verses in singing hymns. We said the Lord’s prayer in Swahili and English until Swahili-speaking members objected, saying God needs to hear our prayers in only one language. English-speaking Redeemer objected, saying “But we need to hear it in Swahili.” We didn’t debate; we alternated.
Soon, English-speaking Redeemer began adopting Swahili phrases in conversation.
Which brings us to our final point for today.
Be flexible.
In one way of thinking all churches are multicultural. Concentrating on the multicultural in ministry is forging new ground. Develop a welcoming atmosphere and follow your instincts.
If you’d like a team from Redeemer to make a presentation on our multicultural experience, please leave a comment and we will get back to you.
2×2 was recently in conversation with a pastor researching the concept of team ministry. He was interested in our VBS-aid program.
Team Ministry is a concept which we think must be explored. It answers many of the challenges small churches face and has great promise. The problem is that it flies against the tradition of the entire parish life revolving around the congregation’s relationship with one pastor (and adding more pastors only as the congregation grows). This age-old model of the church is foundering because small churches cannot afford the salaries all pastors expect, regardless of the number of people supporting a ministry.
The modern era faces another challenge which team ministries can address. Modern ministry requires leadership with multiple skill sets. It is not likely that any congregation, much less the smaller congregations, will find one pastor who can provide all the services they need.
Team ministry is worth exploring for any mission-minded congregations, but especially for those who fear they have no future.
They may face some obstacles. Pastors may feel threatened by outsiders influencing their parish. Congregations might share some distrust. Programs like this aren’t in the current budgets and congregations may be hesitant to fund something “different.”
VBS-aid is an ideal way to give team ministry a try. VBS-aid trains teams of 4-8 people to travel to several churches during the summer to provide leadership for Bible School outreach programs. The program calls for the congregation and its leadership to work with the team to do upfront recruitment and to put a fall program in place so that there is a reason for VBS newcomers to return. VBS-aid pledges to work and help train congregation members, so that the congregation grows its skills while they have some hands-on help to get them started.
Congregations will work with VBS-aid for about two months — preparation, training and recruitment; the two-week Bible School, and follow up. Then they are gone — until next year, if the congregation liked the program. VBS-aid connects congregations, church camps, seminaries, and the community. A lot of talents and skills are made available for a minimal investment ($5000-$7500 — far less than it would cost to hire and train part- or full-time help). The congregation will have had a taste for team ministry and may begin to think of other ways to team with the greater church and the community in mission.
We encourage congregations to visit (www.vbsaid.com) and start to think if the summer of 2012 might be the summer to get your feet wet with team ministry. Talk about it in your congregation and plan to budget for it now. Contact us for more information. We will be glad to make a presentation to your congregational leaders.
It is very common to hear church leaders talk about demanding change in congregations. Often failure to change — even failure to want change — is cited by judicatories as reason enough to cut services and open the cattle chute leading a congregation to closure.
All this talk may be well intentioned, but it is puzzling and frustrating to the laity. Clergy are just as frustrated. They spend a lot of time sharing stories about their congregations that refused to change. Meanwhile, church closings are growing more numerous and more contentious.
At the root of the problem is failure to consider the lay point of view. As we have pointed out in many posts, change is rarely defined. Lay members do not know what the clergy want. They suspect clergy don’t know either.
They are asking: What do they want us to do differently? They seem to still want Sunday morning worship, choirs, offerings taken, Sunday School taught, meetings held, pot luck dinners prepared, and the property cared for. How can we expected to do all this and additional work? Do they want us to stop being who we are? Is there something the matter with us?
The relationship between judicatory/clergy and the congregation becomes like a marriage controlled by a nagging spouse. Expect divorce! Apply the Golden Rule. How would you feel if week after week, meeting after meeting, you were told to change? It is demoralizing. Demoralized people are going to dig in their heals.
What is going through the lay person’s mind is something like this (They may be afraid to share their concerns and risk being labeled “Won’t Change.”):
“I’ve worked all my life for this church. I’ve gone to Sunday School, sung in the choir, attended youth meetings, served on committees, been at worship services almost every week. I was baptized here, confirmed here, married here and my children were baptized here. I’ve done everything I’ve been asked to do. I may not tithe but I put a lot of money in the plate and sweat into the work. What do they want from me? Why aren’t I good enough? And how about the pastor? Doesn’t the pastor get a paycheck for doing this?”
When the laity are faced with the demands for change, their arms cross and they lean back in their chairs. They are getting defensive for good reason. They are under attack. The laity stand to lose everything — their friends and their support system fostered over many years, their status in the ecumenical community and the secular community as it relates to the local communities of faith, their sense of worth, their heritage, their property, their accumulated offerings, their future, their faith, and
the sense that God loves them the way they are — which is the foundation of any strong church of any size. Their families and friendships are at risk of being divided. They face modern-day excommunication. Clergy coldly advise lay people to move to other churches where they must start re-building their reputation, friendships and influence with the real possibility that their new church will suffer the same fate in a few years. It is no surprise that what few statistics have been collected reveal that the suddenly unchurched remain unchurched — a loss to all Christendom — but the “transforming regional bodies” treat them as little more than collateral damage.
From the lay point of view, they are being asked to “change” while everything else in the church remains the same. Clergy play the same role and do the same things. They are the only leadership option provided, and the laity must work with whatever skills or failings this one person has. Change may require different help but there is no budget for that — and that’s not how it’s done! What is change going to cost? How can a congregation budget for this and still pay all the same expenses? Don’t even think about spending endowment money or church equity to create change. Resources must be preserved! If change doesn’t happen and churches fail, the blame is invariably placed on the congregation. And the church wonders why people have stopped attending church!
It is time to rethink this approach and take a careful look at the effects of modern-day transformational policies on the individual church members and the communities. Perhaps the transformation process, which has worthy goals, would be more effective if judicatories took the oath of other healers: First, do no harm. Along with the success stories, study the failures. When this process fails, it fails big time! Revisit the communities where churches have been forced into closure as a result of failed “transformation” policies. Look carefully at the role of clergy and the judicatory in a congregation’s history. Interview the members who become excommunicated by the transformation process. Do this now!
The Bible talks about transformation, but it spends much more time talking about love. This should still be the focus of any clergy/congregation relationship. Concentrating on this may empower the longed-for change.
Join Bishop Ruby Kinisa as she visits small churches "under cover" to learn what people would never share if they knew they were talking to their bishop.
Undercover Bishop will always be available in PDF form on 2x2virtualchurch.com for FREE.
Print or Kindle copies are available on Amazon.com.
For bulk copies, please contact 2x2: creation@dca.net.
MISSION INSPIRATION OFFER
A visual and biblical guide to help congregations define their missions.
Contact Info
You can reach
Judy Gotwald,
the moderator of 2x2,
at
creation@dca.net
or 215 605 8774
Redeemer’s Prayer
We were all once strangers, the weakest, the outcasts, until someone came to our defense, included us, empowered us, reconciled us (1 Cor. 2; Eph. 2).
Be calm. Wait. Wait. Commit your cause to God. He will make it succeed. Look for Him a little at a time. Wait. Wait. But since this waiting seems long to the flesh and appears like death, the flesh always wavers. But keep faith. Patience will overcome wickedness.
—Martin Luther
Today, when someone visits your church, it is likely they have already formed their first impression of your congregation from their online search. Congregations need to put their best foot forward on their web sites.
