On Church Growth Consulting we are always looking for ways to help grow the church and to help you grow your church. We are providing a series of questions to help you think through the process of church growth. Here we go with question number 2.
What is Your Church Mission Statement?
A follow-up question would be: Does your congregation know the mission statement?
A clear, concise mission statement is a very helpful tool in thinking through church growth. Once you have a mission statement in place you have something to evaluate all your ideas by. When you are considering a new idea, you make sure it fits into your mission statement. If it does, then it is worth pursuing. If it doesn’t, then you should probably pass on the idea. I will use our church mission statement as an example. The first time we started the process of developing a mission statement we came up with this:
Advancing the Kingdom of God by living the Great Commandment and the Great Commission.
This statement was built around Matthew 22:37-40 and Matthew 28:18-20. We feel that it allows for a good mix of outreach and in-reach, keeping a good balance of evangelism, teaching, worship, fellowship, and discipleship. Over time, however, we realized that our congregation didn’t seem to connect with the statement. What we did was change the statement a little but not the focus of the statement. Our revised mission statement is now:
Advancing the Kingdom of God one person at a time.
We work this statement into every meeting we have. We include it in discussion and in prayer. It is good to know that we have a purpose and that we are doing things in the Kingdom on purpose. Take some time to pray about your Mission statement. It will be worth whatever time you invest in developing it.
On Church Growth Consulting we are going to start a new series of articles documenting our SEO strategies for developing some more of our Church Directory Sites. We documented the SEO strategies of our first Church Directory Site in a series of articles called “If They Can’t Find You”. In this series we are going to follow the progress of three sites:
The Cape Coral and Orlando sites have been aging since the end of April. The Cape Coral site has had one article written on it. The Orlando Florida site has two articles written. I have been pointing links at the sites for over a month. The Key West site is only a week old, and has two articles written on it. Let’s look at where the sites are on Google searches right now.
The Cape Coral Florida Churches site is currently on page 9 in position 90:
The Orlando Florida Churches is currently on page 27 in position 267
The Key West Florida Churches site is still new and so it is getting a pretty good result, which if you have been reading the articles on this site about SEO you know that it wont last. The site will move backward before it moves forward. Right now it is on page 3 at position 24
I am going to write articles for each site so that they all have at least five articles on them. I will also write periodic updates on this site to point some extra links at the sites. I think it will be interesting to see how the sites move. The goal is to get each site to return on page 1 of a Google search.
At Church Growth Consulting we have often discussed the importance of getting your sites noticed as a result of search engine searches. This will allow us to have an impact around the world with our web ministries. One of our test sites was a church directory we started and discussed in a series of articles called “If They Can’t Find You”. That site is now getting page 1 returns in position 2 and 3. Our SEO was effective and worked. In developing that site, we would also like some of the individual pages to show up on the results as well. Of the four pages we would like to see return high, 3 of them return page 1 results. The fourth page, “Key West Florida Churches”, has a lot of competition and doesn’t seem to want to move off of page 6.
So we employed another strategy for that one page. We started a site called “Key West Florida Churches“. We purchased the domain name for $9.69 for a year. We are taking advantage of free web hosting from Good News Domains. We will apply the same SEO techniques to this site as we did to our first test site. We are currently getting a page 3 position 25 result.
The site initially showed up on page 2 at position 14, but it started to slide pretty quickly. If you remember from our initial series of articles, new sites usually disappear from the results for a while. We will begin applying our SEO techniques and see how quickly we can get the site on page 1. If it doesn’t get sandboxed it should be a couple of month process. If it gets sandboxed, it could take six months. We are starting the process and we will report on what happens.
