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Evangelism

How Many People Heard Your Sermon This Morning?

In dozens of churches near Philadelphia and hundreds or even thousands of churches across the country, hard-working pastors stood before their congregations this morning and delivered sermons to fewer than 50 people.

A conscientious pastor probably worked for days on that sermon. He or she probably spent the same amount of time on his or her sermon as far fewer pastors who delivered sermons to larger congregations.

Preaching is a major investment for every congregation whether they have 50 members or 1000 members—probably half the annual church budget.

Yet churches resist using the tools the modern era provides to preach the gospel to every corner of the world.

2×2, the web site that grew from Redeemer Lutheran Church’s exclusion from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, began with little experience with the internet. We had only a static web site which we rarely updated — just like the vast majority of churches who are concentrating on paying a pastor.

2x2virtualchurch.com became our new site.

2×2 studied the medium and followed recommended practices. We had no money to invest in outside help, so we learned how to do this ourselves.

Perhaps we were the perfect candidates for this evangelism frontier. We discovered that a small church can swim with the big fish!

Here is a mid-year report from the congregation SEPA Synod claims doesn’t exist (because they say so).

  • Every DAY 106 followers read our messages with our posts delivered to their email addresses. Huge potential for growth here!
  • Every WEEK an additional 250 or more come to our web site for information.
  • Every MONTH more than 1000 new readers find our site.
  • We’ve had 7000 visits this YEAR (in addition to our daily readers) and are on track to double that by the end of the year.

(Editorial update-Jan 16, 2013): All of these numbers have doubled since this was published five months ago!)

2×2 started strong in the Middle Atlantic states and California. In recent months our readership in Southern states is spiking. We’ve had readers in every state and regular readers in a dozen countries. Six congregations write to us weekly and share their ministry challenges and successes.

Topics which draw readers to 2×2 are (in order of popularity)

  • Object Lessons for Adults
  • Social Media
  • Small Congregation Ministry
  • Broader Church Issues
  • Vacation Bible School

We’ve learned that it is impossible to predict the popularity of a post. We had a Whoville theme party last January and the post about that still attracts search engine traffic several times each week. A post about a visit to a small church in a Philadelphia suburb and its pastor’s “brown bag” sermons for adults began attracting new readers daily, which led us to develop object lesson sermons.

Several seminaries have sent students to 2×2 for discussion topics.

2×2 has established both a mission voice and reach that rivals or surpasses mid-sized churches. We’ve done it on a shoestring budget. Another year to 18 months will no doubt add to our reach.

We will continue our experiment in modern evangelism.

How many people heard the sermon your church paid for this morning?

photo credit: Photomatt28 via photo pin cc
05 Aug 2012

The History of Evangelism: A Pictorial Primer

Lesson 4

01 Aug 2012

Scalability: Religion Seeks It But Can’t Embrace It

Exponential Growth vs Scalable Growth

The Christian Church has recently focused on the Gospel account of Jesus sending his disciples into the world 2×2.

Jesus’ concept of mission was built on exponential growth. If two people are each successful in reaching two people — for a total of four — and they in turn form teams of two reaching four more— that’s exponential growth. The effort and cost must be repeated again and again. The church will grow with hard work and dedication.

This was remarkably effective. Within a few hundred years, the Gospel spread to the farthest borders of the known world.

Scalability is a bit different. It is a term that centers on the power of technology. How can teams of two reach a thousand or more people using the same effort it takes them to reach four?

The answer is incalculable—and entirely possible. The tools are in our hands to make mission work scalable beyond the wildest dreams of the early Christian apostles. The same work required to reach or teach 100 people can also reach or teach a million for basically the same outlay of resources.

So why aren’t we doing it?

Roadblocks to Scalability

Sadly, the church is not set up to take advantage of scalability.

Try this, for example. Take an idea to a religious institution. They will have a great deal of difficulty thinking beyond their own constituency. “But don’t you see,” you might argue, “you have the power to reach beyond your congregation, beyond your geographic territory, beyond your denomination.”

They will respond with confusion. “But it’s our job to serve our constituency. We work for [name the regional entity.]”  

They will try to be helpful. Scratching their heads, they will suggest, “Take your idea to [another territorial constituency that might be a bit bigger]. Maybe they can help you.”

Any denomination can reach congregations and clergy of all denominations all over the world with truly helpful information—all for the same effort that they might put into a local symposium or workshop which they would charge 50 people $25 each to attend. They won’t, though, because tradition outweighs potential.

Oddly, the efforts to take advantage of the power of the internet are not coming from the higher echelons of the Church. Many regional web sites are of poor quality and virtually all are self-focused. Some of the flashiest regional web sites focus on only their own work—not the work of their members. They are ignoring the potential to strengthen community. They are also ignoring the potential to reach the unchurched — which is their mission.

Church leadership is accustomed to publishing and teaching coming from top down. There was a time when this was necessary. Not everyone owned a printing press and distribution system. There grew to be a comfort in the control which was part of this outdated system. Because control was once possible in publishing they mistakenly believe that it is necessary. It is not only unnecessary in today’s world; it is impossible.

The system of the past is clumsy and archaic, but the Church’s entire structure is built around it.

Smaller entities—individual institutions, small congregations and even individual church members are making stronger headway.

Examples

One example,  www.workingpreacher.org, a project of Luther Seminary, features guest theologians from many backgrounds, analyzing the weekly lectionary. Directed towards pastors, anyone can study the week’s scripture guided by the insights of a seminary professor.

Another: ministry-to-children.com is a web site started by Tony Kummer, a youth/family pastor. It is a lively, interdenominational exchange of ministry ideas and resources that has a large community participating and helping one another. A small church in Africa asked for 2×2’s help in finding affordable educational resources. We directed them to this web site and they were delighted!

Jason Stambaugh writes a blog, www.heartyourchurch.com. He is an individual layperson who works in social media and is a member of a small congregation. He writes about social media in the church and other church issues.

A college student in Texas, Virginia Smith, has used the internet to help small congregations access used Vacation Bible School resources. She’s just one young person passionately engaged in mission, armed with the web. (www.vbs247.webs.com/) Virginia has been very helpful to 2×2 in networking.

And then there is this site, 2×2, the project of Redeemer Lutheran Church, East Falls, Philadelphia, a church the Lutheran denomination (ELCA) determined was too small to fulfill its mission (the old-fashioned way). Three years after locking our members out of our church building, 2×2 is reaching more than a thousand readers a month with a significant local readership with global reach. (And we are just beginning.) We offer ideas for small church ministry and attempt to prompt dialog on small church issues.

Scalable projects are our passion—not to make vast amounts of money, as is often the aim of online enterprise, but to build an new infrastructure that will provide hope and help for neighborhood ministries that we believe are the strength of the Christian Church. We believe there is fiscal potential that would provide the hands-on resources to neighborhood churches that can’t afford them the old-fashioned way. (And this is a large number of churches!)

Meanwhile, denominations concentrate on building Christian communities of a certain number so that they can afford a pastor/building and support their regional and national denomination.

This is not scalable. And it is failing. But it’s still how the Church measures success!

09 Jul 2012

Reverse Evangelism: How to Shrink Your Numbers

2×2 has written before about math in the church. Often when church leaders with a flair for management put pencil to paper they end up recommending the merger or consolidation of faith communities.

Looks good on paper. It might make sense on the map. But the equation is faulty.

We’ve experienced the failure to understand Church math before in East Falls. We’re seeing it again. This time our Roman Catholic neighbors are the victims of Church managers wanting what is best for the bottom line —their bottom line— rather than the congregational mission.

It is textbook church math, where 1 + 1 can equal 0.

The proud neighborhood school of St. Bridget’s had fairly steady enrollment for the last six years, dipping slightly to 198, a loss of only 26 students in the midst of a terrible recession. Not bad!

Two or three miles away, Manayunk’s Regional School—already the product of several closed churches or church schools—had experienced a much sharper decline during the same period (about 50%) — 213 down from 419.

So the Roman Catholic Blue Ribbon Commission looked at the map and the numbers. Here’s what they came up with. Pick a new name for the Manayunk school (where consolidation is already failing) so that there is no heritage or loyalty. (Where has Redeemer encountered that logic?).

Which direction should the schools merge? Real estate is hot in East Falls. There are likely more lucrative options with that property in a collegiate neighborhood. Decision: Send the East Falls kids to the crowded streets of Manayunk.

The magic number to make the new St. Blaise viable was 255. Manayunk already had 213. They needed — a mere 42 willing Fallser children.

Except it doesn’t work like that with families and their passion for their children’s education, their faith and their loyalty to their neighborhoods and traditions.

Despite desperate pleas from parish priests in Manayunk and East Falls, the math wasn’t working. In this case, 213 + 198 = 155. Neither school community liked the idea. They fell short of the minimum by 100 children. Nearly all the families in both neighborhoods decided that some unknown solution was superior than the one dictated to them by the Church. There will be no St. Blaise. No Holy Child. No St. Bridget. No Saint Lucy, Saint Mary the Assumption, Saint John the Baptist or St. Josaphat. The last four disappeared in previous downsizing.

Down. Down. Down. More damage is likely as the churches suffer from the loss of community and tradition which the schools created and fostered.

And still church leaders turn first to closing churches and merging churches — as if fiscal sense makes evangelical sense.

It doesn’t.

25 Jun 2012

The Virtues of the Modern Evangelist

There was a song taught to children back in the 50s or 60s. It taught us to think of ourselves as missionaries.

Just around the corner lives a stranger child.
Did you smile at him? Were you kind to him?
Did you tell her of the one who loves us so?
Father, Comforter and Friend.

( I updated the lyrics to include the “forgotten” gender.) The question today is “When do we stop thinking of ourselves as missionaries and evangelists and start leaving that to the paid “experts.”

Today many churches and denominations have lost the sense of evangelism. It is just a big word that’s part of a church name. St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, for example. Often—despite the name—congregations, regional bodies and denominations forget that their purpose is to spread the gospel to every stranger. It is so easy to become something of a club—one in which you have no right to play if you don’t sufficiently pay.

Fixing this requires an attitude adjustment—an infusion of “evangelical” thinking.

There is good news! It has never been easier or less expensive to fulfill our evangelical purpose. Any church of any size can participate.

Things have changed in the world of evangelism. Decades ago, missionaries had to be carefully trained. They needed to thoroughly understand theology and immerse themselves in a new culture and language. While, this is still helpful, the internet makes it possible for any congregant to interact with any other Christian anywhere in the world. Language barriers are toppling. So are cultural barriers.

There may be some dangers in opening mission work to the less trained, but there is a cure for that. Train us!

Training can begin with the fostering of evangelical traits.

  • Evangelists must be patient. Patience means listening. Patience means allowing for missteps. Patience means taking time—as much time as it takes.
  • Evangelists must be generous. Generosity does not have to mean money. Think first in terms of giving time and attention.
  • Evangelists must think constantly of others. The minute the attention turns inward, toward your congregation and your people or yourself, you will begin to fail.
  • Evangelists must be transparent. Deceitful practices leave lasting scars.There is no room for deceit in preaching the Gospel. Jesus looked for this trait in his disciples and he found it in Nathaniel. “Truly, here is an Israelite within whom there is no deceit.”
  • Evangelists preach a consistent message. We can make the Bible very complicated and confuse even ourselves. If we are confused, our message will be lost on those new to the Gospel. It may help to stick with one Gospel to get started. The Gospel of John is simple and direct, but deep in interpretation that crosses cultural barriers. It is also very inclusive with stories of Jesus’ interaction with men and women, Jew and Gentile, and both the educated and working class.
  • Evangelists cannot be arrogant. God made us all equal in His love.
  • Evangelists cannot be selfish. Our work is not about us.
  • Evangelists must be humble, patient and kind, slow to anger, and steadfast in love and teaching. 
  • They must be curious—full of questions, helping others to discover answers.

Begin your congregational outreach by fostering these traits in your congregation. Start telling the old, old story. Your web site can be your hub. Start publishing mission content and Christians from all over the world will begin to find you.

15 Jun 2012

The Church: Is bigger better?

The Ambassadors from Redeemer have visited nearly 50 churches since we were locked out of our own church.

We started with congregations near us, close to the city. Most of our early visits were to small congregations.

As we drifted toward the suburbs, we found congregations to be a little larger. But in all our visits we have visited only three or four churches with more than 100 in attendance (all but one on significant holidays).

As a general observation, the larger the church the more similar things are. The liturgy is more set in stone. The hymns choices are more predictable. You have the organ. You have the choir (with paid section leaders, in some cases). The involvement of the people is more standard. People file out of the sanctuary in groups that don’t interact much. The bulletins look alike. The list of activities could be cut and pasted from one to the other.

Smaller churches are unpredictable, more likely to be innovative in their worship, more diverse and more inclusive. They are livelier and more spontaneous. More people are involved — sometimes in unusual ways. There is more going on between the people, even in the worship setting.

(See our Ambassadors Report.)

No wonder most people belong to small churches! That may not be where the money is, but it is where there is a lot of action. And still the attention of church leadership is on bigger congregations — that overall fewer people will join—because most people choose to belong to smaller churches.

How do we grow small churches without forcing them to lose their personality? How do we tap their energy and ideas? Or are we most interested in tapping their assets? That’s a real question. There is an  economic dichotomy in the Church that is the source of a great deal of church conflict. The economic model that the Church aspires to is not the economic model that people support with their hearts or their pocketbooks.

Most of the economy of churches revolves around the ability to pay clergy and support hierarchy, but that’s not necessarily where ministry is most effective.

But that’s how the Church measures success.

07 Jun 2012

Mission Work Then and Mission Work Now

God works mysterious wondersNot so many years past, mission work in far away places was something congregations knew about and supported but little more. It was impractical and impossible for congregational members to be directly involved in distant outreach.

Mission work was the realm of specially trained and denominationally sponsored missionaries who traveled to faraway places, often with their families. They either found work in foreign places and evangelized on the side (the tent-making approach) or worked full time — preaching, building hospitals and schools, gaining trust and creating Christian community.

The method was a choice driven by the philosophy of a denomination or sponsoring group. Christianity spread around the world, but it took decades to train native leadership to take over the “mission fields,” a popular term that became politically incorrect a couple of decades ago.

Back home, sponsoring congregations looked forward to periodic reports. Missionaries would return home, visit congregations with stories and photos, and raise support for future work.

That was then.

2×2 is discovering that it is now possible for congregations to become directly involved in mission efforts. We stumbled upon this mission. We put mission content on our website. For all we knew, there it would sit. But within a year faraway congregations found the content and contacted us. Today, congregations in Kenya and Pakistan correspond with 2×2 regularly. We learn about their ministries, share experiences, prayers and scriptures and offer ideas for ministry.

A few weeks ago, 2×2 sent an MP3 recording of a simple anthem we thought would translate well in any culture or language. One African church wrote to us this weekend to tell us their children learned the anthem from the recording and sang it in worship last Sunday.

Another congregation asked for ideas for Good Friday and later for a youth retreat. Another asked for help with a children’s curriculum.

We make it a policy to answer requests as best we can. When we have no answer from our own experience, we point to online resources.

But there’s more to it. We are learning from their ministries as well. The “mission field” includes us!

This was not possible ten years ago. Today, any congregation can expand its mission expression anywhere in the world. The role of regional and denominational offices is likely to change. They may begin to concentrate on helping congregations create and maintain direct connections.

Congregations are entering new territory and must “get over” the sense that mission work is only for the experts—an attitude we’ve encountered even in local outreach. This path was followed in the past because it was the only way possible. The danger we face today is to assume that this is the only proper way to reach out with the Gospel. Because top-down control was the only way then, does not mean it is the only way now.

There are signs that this transition will not come easily. Denominational leaders have invested a great deal in creating mission infrastructure that is becoming outdated. There will be challenges to be sure, but they must be met, because things are going to change. (Use the word “transform” if it helps!)

The Church is not experiencing anything exceptional. Every realm of society is learning the uncharted byroads of the information superhighway.

How this develops congregation to congregation remains to be seen as we explore new territory. Meanwhile, our suggestion is for congregations to keep it real.

  • Communication must be heartfelt and genuine with participants working to share actual experiences with credentials honestly presented. What your congregation cannot handle should be referred to those who can.
  • Explore possibilities but never assume patronizing or expert status.
  • Study the methods of the past. Learn from their vast experience and adapt.
  • Never publish anything about another faith fellowship without their knowledge and permission. You may make life difficult for Christians in cultures that do not encourage minority religions.
  • Make sure communication is two-way. Other cultures have a lot to teach us!
  • Be prepared for the energy of distant congregations to change your congregation’s perspective.
  • How will you find one another? Add helpful ministry content regularly to your congregation’s web site. Write in a way that search engines will find you. Wait. It may take months, God will work his wonders in mysterious ways.

God is doing something new, but if we stick to the old mission manuals, the Church will never be able to perceive it.

photo credit (retouched): Genista via photo pin cc

14 May 2012

Qualitative Church Statistics vs Quantitative Church Statistics

2×2 has discussed this issue before, but yesterday we heard a social media expert say the same things we were saying from a marketing perspective.

Brian Solis, a leading market analyst, uses the terms qualitative measurement as compared to quantitative measurements.

He discussed how the quantitative statistics of the past mean less in the world that is evolving.

How many members you have on your congregational roster means little compared to the engagement you can measure among both members and nonmembers. There are new possibilities for building relationships with the community that do not fit the old church model. The borders of your community are expanding. (2×2 is just a little church, but we get ministry questions from all over the world.)

This will affect church institutions as well. Supporting Lutheran Social Ministry agencies was a popular option for churches in decades past. Often a representative would attend a service to give a Temple Talk and report on their agency’s good work. Today many churches get involved in local humanitarian efforts through their associations in the community and work. They hear their frequent messages outside of church, are attracted to their causes, and sense they can help. The church’s social agencies (which do a great job!) will get short shrift —unless they too learn to engage with the community in new ways. Secular Social Service agencies are very good at this and will get church members’ attention.

Engagement is a new emphasis. It’s always been important to ministry. Before the advent of Social Media there was no way to measure it. You never know how many people read your fliers and newspaper ads. You can only guess how many people might have listened to your radio spot. Pastors had no idea if their sermons had any lasting effect whatsoever. We shaped our ministries on tradition and guesswork.

Engagement can now be measured. You know how many people visit your web site. You know what topics led them to you. You know which pages they visit and how long they spend on each page. You can engage your visitors with comments, polls and forms long before you meet them.

In some ways it is good that the Church tends to lag behind. We can be beneficiaries of other people’s trailblazing.

But the Church cannot afford to lag too far behind. All churches compete against an overwhelming amount of secular competition.

When our Ambassadors plan a visit, we visit a congregation’s web site first. You can bet that other potential visitors are doing the same thing. We are surprised at how many churches still have NO web site. Many who have web sites have not updated them in years. We clicked on a link for “latest newsletter” and read news from 2009. Even the best SEPA congregational web site we visited was just beginning to get on board with its web potential. They were paying a firm to curate secular feature-type news, a good thing, but still missing the interactive potential of Social Media.

We can’t say it too often or too loud. All congregations must get involved in Social Media if they are to be taken seriously in coming years.

A good denominational goal would be to help every congregation get started and learn to keep up with this vital but fast-changing communication/evangelism medium. You will have to hold a lot of hands in this venture, but it is necessary and worth it. This is concrete help that congregations need and denominations are best positioned to supply.

2×2 can help!

photo credit: slightly everything via photo pin cc
09 May 2012

Ministering in a Design-Driven World: Branding Part 2

An article in Forbes today talks about how design is now a pivotal part of any organization’s identity.

The article speaks to the Church. Churches are accustomed to poor design in their publications. They work with poor equipment and volunteers much of the time. The church newsletter, dotted with cheesy clip art, is fairly standard even among large churches. It’s almost a universal branding—and the branding message is not a good one.

Your members will accept this approach to design. But  is it working beyond your church membership? Is it helping you communicate with the world — a world that is increasingly influenced by design.

Don’t despair. Good design is accessible even to design amateurs.

Facebook makes design simple. All you have to do is upload photos. Everything will fit into the design template. There is still an art to finding, choosing and using photos. Taking your own photos is so easy today, there should be nothing stopping you.

But Facebook is Facebook. One design fits all!

Blogging formats offer the same professional design capabilities with more variety. Start your blog by choosing a theme — there are hundreds to choose from. It will be easy to create a clean and functional web site using a theme (template).

Ask your members to spend an hour taking photos of the neighborhood for you to use on your congregation’s web site, blog or Facebook. Make a contest out of it to get more people involved and add to the fun! They don’t have to be “church” photos. They can be street scenes, store fronts, parks, schools, gardens, fields, sports, architectural features or public events. This will communicate to the unchurched that your congregation cares about the neighborhood.

Be cautious about using images of people without their permission. You can do this by artful cropping. Watch your local TV news for tips. Whenever they take school footage for example they tend to show backs of heads or images of kids walking or playing with heads totally cropped. If the people are your members and they say OK — go ahead and use full images.

Clip art has come of age. There are great sources of photos available for free use if you add a photo credit at the bottom of your post.  Try Photopin or Flickr.

Learn to use a photo image editing program.  (Type “free photo editing software” into your search engine.) Most computers have a basic application pre-installed.  Start by learning to size and crop your photos. Then learn to add type or adjust colors.

It’s time to say good-bye to the amateurish church newsletter. People expect more today. And it isn’t hard to give it to them. It helps to brand your church as progressive and forward-looking, not stuck in the past with out-dated communication skills.

04 May 2012

Let Go and Let God. It was never more possible!

Social Media is going to change the Church—whether or not the Church participates.

The Church is slow to embrace the power of this influence in our lives. It goes against the way the Church has worked for a very long time.

Trust and obey. Foundational words of faith. It means to trust and obey God, by the way.

Somehow the God part gets forgotten. Keeping Christians in line becomes an emphasis of anyone feeling empowered. The lines drawn by church leaders can be moving targets. Ideas change from century to century, decade to decade, and nowadays, year to year.

No one dares to quote the Bible to justify slavery anymore, but it worked for nearly 2000 years.

It worked when slaves had no voice.

Centuries of habit are going to be hard to break, but the time has come to trust the people of God. If we do something egregiously heretical, there are any number of forums for redress. There is no longer a need to monitor the thinking and voice of individual Christians.

We have always believed in this. It’s just been hard to practice.

We teach every three-year-old — Let your light shine.

Then we start to add the “buts” until their little lights are snuffed out.

The Church has never had more potential power. It can motivate and move EVERY member. You don’t have to roster us. You don’t have to qualify us. You don’t have to sort us out by race, age, status, or genitalia. We’ve been structuring our faith around such nonsense for a long time. Someday we are either going to laugh at our historical efforts to limit or exclude (thereby protecting power) — or hang our heads in shame.

This potential power of social media should spur our efforts to effectively share our faith outside the church. We are going to have to be part of the dialog outside our walls — because that’s where the conversations are taking place.

We have to be educators in many forums. We have to mix with the rest of the human race.

That approach has been taken before!

Let Go and Let God.

photo credit (retouched): crazyluca69 via photo pin cc

02 May 2012