Ten Ways to Grow Your Church Without God…
- Posted on July 05, 2007
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For the record, here are the ten ways to grow your church WITHOUT God:
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.
Here, very quickly and briefly, are ten ways to slowly kill your church WITH God:
1. Pews. Everyone loves a good hard pew. And, they’re biblical!
2. Steeples. Gosh, they’re pretty, and they point toward heaven.
3. A huge cross on the wall. They will know we are Christians by our cross.
4. Committees out the wazoo. Consensus is a good thing.
5. Hymnals. I think Gutenberg was on to something.
6. Chick tracts. Repentance can best be taught through the use of comics.
7. Suits and ties. If it was good enough for Jesus…
8. The Organ. Nothing else need be said here.
9. Walking the Isle. How will people come to Christ with no isle?
10. A really jammin’ bell choir. There’s nothing like Fanny Crosby set to bells.
Come on people. Leather recliners are no less holy than padded pews. And projected lyrics are not sinful. Neither is advertising or starbucks. (Or steeples or hymnals).
As I’ve said before… if pastors were in this to grow something or make lots of money, there are a lot of easier ways to do it than to pastor a church. Anyone in ministry longer than 10 minutes knows that.
Your thoughts?
Here's an interesting article by Ray Baumann. It seems that God has now gone on record as hating logos, web design, Starbucks, leadership, phone books, theatres, media, school programs, technology, video, dramas, egg hunts, and networking...
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jdb on Tue, December 23, 2008
Remember we have to move slowly and carefully to surgically remove these things because the people are more important than the “way we want things to be” too. The same way we do not rip someones cigerettes out of their hand and scrap off there crude tatoo with a dull rusty spoon the day after they get saved, We peel their fingers off these things one at a time as we feed them God’s word and let them know these things are not biblical and the only thing that we should hold that tightly to is Jesus and his word. And o yeah prayer lots of prayer because the Holy Spirit is the only one that really changes people.
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