God is doing something new AGAIN in East Falls
Redeemer, East Falls is too small to serve its “missional” purpose (“missional” is not a word but church people seem to understand it).
That was the premise used by Bishop Claire Burkat and her coterie. It was never true. It sounded good to the people they needed to convince in order to have their way—which had nothing to do with mission but was all about money and property and synod’s habitual deficit spending.
SEPA’s actions did tons of damage to our people, our congregation and to our neighborhood, but Redeemer’s mission continues to grow. That’s what happens when you work a plan with selfless resilience and flexibility!
One of our projects was to develop our ministry online (since we had no building). We started slowly, doing research and following best practices. The site grew slowly at first, but after about six months, it was apparent there was a foundation for steady growth and an inexhaustible potential.
The site has grown steadily over all. There are day-to-day peaks and valleys, but the weekly and monthly trends reveal steady growth that is picking up.
In the last two weeks a few remarkable things have begun to happen on www.2x2virtualchurch.com.
We now have 100 people who read out posts by email each day. We have an additional 50 unique visitors every day. Our weekly unique readership (not counting those who follow us on Facebook, Twitter or email) hovered between 180 and 275 for the last six weeks. Adding our subscribers or followers to that number puts us at around 1000 readers each week.
Our global reach is picking up. There are a few countries that check in daily—France, Canada, Great Britain, Netherlands, Australia, Kenya, Pakistan, the Philippines and most recently, India. Twice this week our foreign readership outpaced United States readers, at least until the very end of the day when there is often a surge in North American readership.
People are slowly beginning to participate in the discussion, often by email rather than on the site.
Yesterday, we had a request to find a way to have the site translated into Urdu, so Pakistani Christians might have access to our posts.
We invited churches to follow the site. That invitation has led to interesting friendships with four other congregations—two in Kenya, one in Pakistan and one near to us in Philadelphia.
Redeemer was never more able to fulfill its “missional” purpose. We believe our mission and ministry activities measure well with every other congregation in SEPA (large and small) — who now have the benefit of our resources.