Church Growth Consulting
Blessing the Whole Church
One of the things that we need to remember is that God loves His church. If we are not careful we can begin to think that we have it all figured out and become very critical and judgmental of other churches. When you are being blessed with church growth you need to remember to keep it all in perspective. Look for ways to bless the other churches in your area. At all of our meetings we take a moment to pray for all the churches in our area that are preaching the Word of God. We do that because we are also praying for a revival to sweep our area. When we receive the answer to that prayer, it will take a community of healthy churches to be able to handle what takes place.
This week we are joining with other local churches and doing a “Gospel Explosion” at an outdoor venue. About a dozen churches will be bringing their worship teams and doing a series of 30 minute concerts. This will be a good way to demonstrate a sense of unity among the churches and to encourage and bless one another. It should also be a good venue for some of the churches to be able to attract some new people to their churches. At our church we have decided to keep a very low profile and not try and promote our church. At our church, we try and practice what we preach on Church Growth Consulting and we are currently being very blessed in the “church growth” area, so we will purposely be promoting the other churches instead of our own. Most of the churches will have a booth where they can tell people about what thier church has to offer. We have decided not to have a booth so that we can encourage people to attend some of the other churches. Our hope is that this event will be a great way to bless the whole church.
The Problem with Church Signs
While a church sign that allows you to put in new information every week might be a good way to get people to find or recognize your church, the problem with a lot of church signs is that they produce the opposite result. It might seem like a good idea at the time of purchase. You think about some of the clever and witty things you have to say and you get caught up in the thoughts of how this new sign is going to help bring new people into the church. The reality is, there are only about six or seven really clever and witty things to put on the sign. Then what? The sign becomes another burden. What will we say this week? Now, you not only have a sermon to write, you need to think of something clever for the sign. You search for ideas on the Internet and quickly find out that you have already used all of the good slogans and sayings. Before long the signs begin to say things that are ridiculous and even often offensive. There are some weeks when I drive by a church sign that makes me feel like I need to apologize on behalf of believers everywhere.
Here is my official church growth consulting advice. Before you buy a sign, sit down and try and come up with 52 weeks of material for the sign. If you can do that, then a sign might work out for you. If you can’t, hire a sign painter to create an attractive sign that lists you service times and phone number. Take the money you save and invest in some servant evangelism outreaches. It will be a better use of your money. Don’t do this:
Does anyone think that a sign like the one above is going to draw people in to the church? How about this one:
Ultimately, the best church sign is the people of the church living life in such a way that the Kingdom of God is displayed through them.
Church Growth Consulting - 2009 SEO Experiment - Part 1
In an earlier article we had written that we were no longer going to be writing articles about search engine optimization on Church Growth Consulting. However, we have decided to change that decision to be involved in what promises to be an interesting experiment on search engine optimization. We are going to be involved in a six site web ministry experiment to help explore some SEO techniques.
Our part in the experiment is to develop a site and record its progress on this site in a series of updates over the course of 2009. The site we are starting is Church Marketing. The Church Marketing site will be competing with well established sites in a very competitive keyword. This keywords receives about 7000 searches a month. We are going to try and get our new site to show up as a page 1 Google return for Church Marketing and then measure how much of that traffic we are able to capture.
We have started the site with some articles that we duplicated from some of our other sites (We would never duplicate someone else’ content, but we have no problem with using our own. Duplicate content is not counted by Google and so does not help the site with the search engines. It doesn’t count against us either, so it is helpful in putting some content on a brand new site). We have also added some RSS feeds from some of our other sites so that anyone who stumbles accross the site in its early stages will have something useful to read.
The site has already been indexed by Google. We are going to be doing three things in the near future; we will start adding a series of original articles to the site, we will begin commenting on similar sites and leaving the URL of the new site, we are going to get some links pointed at the site.
We will then bring you regular updates on this site about the progress of our new site. If you are interested in the scope of the entire experiment you can read aout the scope of the experiment on Web Ministry.
Christmas Eve Candle Light Service - Follow Up
The Church Growth Consulting site has had a lot of response to our article on Christmas Eve Candle Light services. There have been emails asking for more information on how to actually strcuture a candle light service. Here is how we normally structure our Christmas Eve services:
As people come in they are handed a candle which should already have the drip protector in place. We welcome everyone and then we usually do our music program. Christmas songs, a couple of specials, some little things by the children, etc. We usually do a short message about the reason for the season and then we begin the candle lighting. (When I finish the message I give instructions for candle lighting) What people need to know is that once a candle is lit it needs to be held straight so that wax doesn’t drip on their skin. When someone is lighting a candle they will put their unlit candle on a ninety degree angle into a lit candle. Once their candle is lit they hold it straight up. A lit candle should never be turned sideways! Also, they need to be careful not to light the hair of the person in front of them on fire, this can happen).
When you are ready for the candle lighting, get your room as dark as possible. Light one candle at the front of the church. From that one candle have your ushers each turn their candle into the one candle that is lit and light their candles. Have them go to the first chair of each row and have the person in the first chair turn their candle into the ushers candle (Remember, the lit candles are always held straight) then the person in the second chair will turn his candle into the lighted candle of the person in the first chair, etc. The ushers then move on to the next row and do the same thing, lighting the candle of the person in the first chair, who then lights the candle of the person in the second chair and so on. As more and more candles are lit the sanctuary will become very bright. The analogy is that Jesus is the light of the world and as we spread the light it overcomes darkness. We usually sing a song called “Light of the World” or “Silent Night” during the candle lighting. We don’t make people hang on the to lit candles for more than about five minutes. Once all the candles are lit you may want to invite the people to stand and sing a final chorus of whatever song you have been singing. It is really a remarkable sight.
Over the years we have come up with a way to blow the candles out. It is kind of “hoakie” but the people seem to enjoy it. We close our service by singing Happy Birthday” to Jesus and then everyone blows out their candle. Make sure you have someone standing by the light switch to turn the lights back on! We pray that you will have a great service!
-
Sign up for Free RSS Feed
-
