Posted on 07/03/2007 3:39:59 PM PDT by Terriergal
By Ray Baumann
Posted: 07/02/2007
Ten Ways To Grow a Church Without God
By Ray Baumann
I have spent many hours figuring out how to grow churches. I recently found some old notes that I had taken at a conference some years ago. To my surprise, I had an outline for success that was void of a Savior even being involved. Back then I focused on what attracted people to church. This is what my list read:
1. “Leadership is key.” This will be my number one way to grow the church without God. Thinking back, I would say that if I had a board comprised of wealthy businessmen, I’d have a great foundation for growing a church. You need resources to reach the community and what better way than to have many resources at your fingertips?
2. You want to create an oasis at church; let’s take a few ideas from Starbucks. Starbucks created a community of coffee drinkers. Starbucks is less about coffee and more about a place to commune. That is what you want to reproduce on Sunday; a place where people want to gather.
3. Next, your church has to offer something others don’t. You have to ask yourself who is your target audience. Find out what your audience wants and give it to them. This includes the type of music, programs, length of service and other variables. You want people to know that all of their needs can be met at church.
4. Spend money on logo and website design. You have to out market the church down the street. Mass mailings, newspaper ads and website traffic are key.
5. Advertise in the phone book, at movie theatres and during school programs. Call the media every time you have an event to get free publicity.
6. Be creative with your presentations. Be sure to utilize all of the latest technology for your cool short video illustrations. To get the full effect, you must have video projectors and plasma TVs. Lighting is also essential to set the mood during services.
7. Don’t let anyone come to church and leave without getting their information. You have one chance to make a first impression. When you have a visitor they must be greeted and shown around the facility and introduced to other church members. Giving them a free gift, like a thumb drive with the church’s information preloaded, is a nice gift.
8. Always be planning for your next event, whether it is an Easter egg hunt or Christmas drama. Every two months something big must be occurring to create excitement.
9. Have sermons focused around life issues such as parenting, managing money, eating right, getting along with others and making the best of your life.
10. Network. If you are going to grow a church, people must know who you are. Make it a routine to eat at the same places frequently. Always be involved with whatever is happening in the community.
All of the above could probably have come out of a Marketing 101 textbook. Not everything on the list is bad, but it is the order that I had them in and what was missing. Looking back, it was an issue of priorities. I believed God wanted me to market for Him but the product was nothing our Savior would endorse. God’s top ten ways to grow a church would look very different. You can see how quickly a church can become self-centered. When the focus is attracting the unchurched or people burnt out on church we travel far from the biblical model. I am firmly convinced that you can get people to show up at your church if you have the money to spend to get them there. Money-marketed churches will be packed with unsaved people who are looking to get something, and it is not the gospel. If you attract them with entertainment you have to keep them entertained.
Recently I overheard two pastors taking about a mutual friend that was asked to resign from a church because attendance was down by 10% and the leadership had decided to go in a new direction. I said to myself, “You have to be joking.” Church leadership is so brainwashed in this numbers game that many churches could care less about what is being preached on Sunday morning as long as the people and money are coming in by droves.
Church leadership must decide who is going to grow their church. You either grow it with man or with God. God’s way produces disciples changed for life; man’s way produces attendees that come as they are and leave as they were.
Distributed by www.ChristianWorldviewNetwork.com
I always cringe when people put such an emphasis on leadership skills. What 'leader' in the Bible came with leadership skills? God chooses the foolish to confound the wise, the humble to put to shame the proud. The outcast in order to humiliate the movers and shakers and influential members of the community. In contrast, all these purpose driven/seeker sensitive church growth types emphasize getting in bed with the influential, the proud, the number counters, movers and shakers.
I just listened to Bob DeWaay’s mp3 entitled Need for the Elders Guarding the Sheep. In it he discussed has Jesus did not give the people what they wanted (an endless supply of bread and fishes) but what they needed - a savior. Powerful discussion at Critical Issues Commentary.
Of course, the "I" refers to Jesus, not the person reading the verse!
(Acts 2:47 KJV) Praising God, and having favour with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily such as should be saved.
The only program that truly works.
You mean like this? This is my favorite.
Acts 4:13When they saw the courage of Peter and John and realized that they were unschooled, ordinary men, they were astonished and they took note that these men had been with Jesus.
Mind you they were broke too. Gave all their stuff away in chapter 2. In chapter 3 we have, 6Then Peter said, "Silver or gold I do not have, but what I have I give you. In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, walk."
This just makes me laugh!
Isn’t church supposed to e about God? Why would you want to growa church without God?
Nonetheless, some intersting and useful church growthtips here.
I’m in Taiwan on a business trip. I read this article and posted this response:
This is a concise look at some of the popular pragmatic methods used in far too churches. The question I am prayerfully pondering is this: How does a concerned saint weigh these type issues in deciding whether to leave his church or continue to bang his head against the wall of worldly pragmatism? The three issues I’ve identified to my elders at my church are: Managerial Control in the way decisions are made and implemented. Product Marketing: worldly considerations in how the church is presented to worldlings. Brand Management: emphasizing uniformity across the entity instead of unity in the body. All of which go unanswered and unaated. With sound preaching Sunday morning, to boot.
“Except the Lord build the house, they labor in vain that build it...” Psalm 127:1a “...therefore, let us arise and build” (Nehemiah 2:18).
If you go to http://www.savingbellevue.com/ one of the responding “pastors” is under the impression that WE build the kingdom.
These targeted “Strategies” are destroying the church from within. The church is not meant to be a place where we mimic the world to draw in the world. It is meant to be a place where we grow in the Word of God as Christians and then go out and reach the lost in the power of the Spirit of God. These strategies have it exactly backwards and are void of the Spirit’s involvement altogether in many cases.
My Church has a sign out front encouraging “Whole hearted followers of Jesus Christ.” The bumper sticker “Times Change- Values Don’t.” and on any given Sunday a reminder that our purpose is to “Glorify God and ENJOY Him forever.”
We may do that - but it won’t be His Kingdom we build!
Agreed. This mentality is swallowing up the American church right now. It is hard to find a good church these days and those that are good are in danger.
Well, there is certainly a valid place for marketing, and churches that don’t realize that are likely to be dying congregations. The question is how to do it in accord with the church’s principles.
Scripture please. I see nowhere in Scripture where WE market our churches.
Every church markets in some way. Do you ever hear ads on the radio for churches? Do you see the religious listings in the newspaper, with ads? That's marketing. The entire objective is to make people aware of teh chrch and encourage them to come and be part of it. In other words, it's marketing. Basically every church does it and those that don't don't last.
And there is nothing wrong with it.
OK. However, that doesn’t detract from the main point: we all market. It’s necessary to any organization’s existence. Unless people know where you are and what you do, they will have a very hard time getting to you. So you market so that people know about you.
When I took some advertising courses, I learned that the best way to kill a bad product is with good advertising. Market a bad product effectively and everyone will try it and quickly see how bad it is.
I wouldn’t call a church letting someone know where they are “marketing.” It is certainly not the kind of marketing found in the market driven church. Rather than saying, “here we are” visit us. The Market-driven church tries to look and sound as much like its customer, the proverbial “unchurched” (who used to be called unsaved before it was determined too offensive to call them such), in order that WE, human beings, might build God’s church.
The indication of who builds a church is different in Scripture. Scripture says that JESUS builds his own church. We go out as witnesses, and if we never had a placquard or sign or radio ad or anything pointing to our existence, Jesus would see to it that those who He wanted to affect through our ministry would be there.
Yes. Having a sign indicating you have a church meeting in a particular place is not bad. Having the church look and act in a way that is not the church, all in an effort to “hook” a fish, is.
Furthermore, the market-driven church is a church that is singly focussed on numbers. Numbers have NOTHING to do with being in the will of God. Yet, what is it that preachers brag about when they get together? “I had XXX baptisms last year in my church.” Preaching of the gospel is not a peeing contest. And getting more sinners under the water gains one nothing in heaven. If they aren’t hearing the true gospel, you’re just giving people very ineffective baths and worse, a false hope.
Pastors:
2preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction.
3For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires (2 Timothy 4)
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