Podcast Episode #218
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A recap about a recent post on the outreach methods churches used to promote their Easter services. While we cover what worked, we also take a look at what didn’t work and why some of these ideas seemed to fall short.
Some highlights from today’s episode include:
- Personal invites are still the best way to get people to come to your church.
- Don’t start anything in your church without first praying about it.
- Prayer should be integral to everything you do as a church.
- A lot of churches do nothing extra for Easter because they think people will naturally come anyway.
- Personal conversations are still the most effective way to invite people to attend your church worship service.
- Online promotion is the most effective way for churches to spend dollars earmarked for marketing.
- If your church goes door-to-door to invite people, take the time to talk to people.
- When you strategically plan your outreach, you see greater participation and more opportunities for success.
- Strategic planning is a stewardship of time.
The six things that seemed to work for churches were:
- Personal Invites.
- Facebook Promotion.
- Coordinated Graphics.
- Door-to-door Invites.
- Intentional, Strategic Planning.
- Prayer.
The four things that didn’t work were:
- Door-to-door Drop-offs.
- Extra Signage.
- Doing Nothing.
- Not Planning.
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Feedback
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It strikes me that, if personal invites and personal conversations are the most effective way to get folks at large to come visit your church, then the most effective form of outreach would be teaching the members to live as what they are, Christians who are happy about their relationship with The Lord. And want to talk to friends about it just like I naturally want to talk about our great-grandson. That would generate invites, and maybe even a desire on the part of others to come see what’s going on that’s got us so involved.
I think it’s called discipleship.
… and in the keep them with what you caught them with line of thinking, gathering with an intentional mindset toward relationship building within the congregation. If people are drawn in by personal invites and conversation, it’s a bit of a bait and switch to put that aspect on the back burner when you gather together.
As a lay person, I find it interesting that prayer is the last thing on the list of things that work.
I’d actually have put prayer at the top of the list or maybe bookend the list in prayer. Prayer is vitally important to the outreach of the church. It is so much so that it should bookend all that we do.