Trouble growing a church
I just got an email from a church in that is doing research on why churches are not reaching as many people as they’d like to. Here’s what the email said:
Most congregations would agree that eaching their community with the gospel of Jesus Christ is the mission of their church, but they just don’t seem to see as much success as there is opportunity. God wants our churches to grow; we want to see our churches grow; but they don’t seem to be growing nearly as fast as there are people to be reached.
Have you experienced similar struggles?
We wanted to ask if you would take a minute and reply to this email with just a couple of sentences that describe a struggle you’ve encountered in effectively reaching your community?
Here is what I replied:
We’re only a year old, so our story may be a little different.
We are reaching a good many unchurched folks from the community.
Our greatest challenge is growing the infrastructure to keep the growth
going. I’m working on growing the SG ministry, assimilation team and
community ministry team.
Things we’re doing to reach the community:
1) professionally done, full color postcard mail outs advertising an
upcoming series, not the cheesy ones that most churches send out.
2) We have an excellent worship service (teaching and music, esp), a cool
environment (movie theater) and top-notch children’s ministry so that when
people do come they are amazed and impacted and they desire to come back
3) a quick and easy process for people to get plugged into service. This
build retention and a desire to involve and invite others.
4) being all over the place in the community
- giving our Oak Leaf balloons and invite cards,
- small road signs at key intersections from time to time
- at festivals, we run a free Moon Walk/Bounce House and give away
popcorn and sno-cones
- We’re at downtown community events volunteering and doing things to
bless the crowds expecting nothing in return (give away bottles of water,
man bounce houses for other non-profit orgs, etc).
- We just got done taking breakfast to 4 local schools during teacher
pre-planning.
Word is spreading that we are out to serve to make the community a better
place to live, not just to get people to come to our church (which, by the
way, happens as a by-product of serving the community).
We’re kicking off a huge community ministry emphasis through our small
groups ministry this fall. Every group will adopt a ministry/service
opportunity in the community and serve there once a month.
We’re even developing a website called servecartersville.com that will
enable people inside and outside our church, who want to serve the
community, to look up opps that fit their schedule and desires. We will
launch this site by January 2008.
5) Our people love our church and want to invite people to it. We call our
members “partners” instead of “members” because we stress that everyone is a
part of this ministry, not just the staff and key volunteers. It will take
us all to reach the community for Christ.
We’ve grown from 250 at our first service one year ago Aug. 20, to averaging
over 590 during the last three weeks. It’s amazing, but we still have
60,000+ unchurched people to reach in our county.
BTW, we have a simple structure where we only focus on 5 things:
1) A weekly worship service
2) Small Groups
3) Children’s Ministry
4) Student Ministry
5) Serving – within the church and outside the church
Most churches have a hundred things they focus on and plug their volunteers into that really only benefit the church and Christians. And those things wear out the volunteers so that they won’t do other things. A church won’t grow if its focus is primarily inward.
