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.
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.
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.
