Church Growth Question # 3
At Church Growth Consulting we are continuing to ask questions to help stimulate your thinking about church growth. Here comes question number three:
Who are you trying to reach?
If you are thinking “everyone” then you are probably shooting a little high. Your church is going to attract certain people. Some people will like the way you do church, others won’t. That’s OK. If you try and be what everyone is looking for you will never move into the identity that God has for your church. I like to think about it this way. In our community there are six churches (our city has a population of about 4000 people. There are about 20,000 people within a 30 minute drive, and there are a lot more churches in that area as well, but in my specific town there are six churches). There is a Methodist church, a Baptist Church, a Lutheran Church, an Episcopal Church, a Catholic Church, and the church I pastor. I love the whole Church. At our church we pray for all these churches every time we meet. I have been at my church for over 20 years so I have watched a lot of Pastors come and go through the other churches. I always try and maintain a good relationship with the other Pastors in town and here is the big thing, I don’t consider them as competition. The only competition we have is with the Evil One. This view point allows me to bless the other churches. Sometimes someone will come to our church and I know that they will fit better in one of the other churches. I encourage them to go and visit. When someone who is new in town calls me about our church, I always ask what they are used to and then point them to the church that will be most like what they are looking for. I don’t need to sell my church, I want to bless the whole church and then God takes care of the rest (God has been so faithful to us in terms of church growth with our weekend attendance running between 400 – 600, which is amazing when you consider we are in a very small community).
I said all that to make this point, you will be better at reaching some people than others. How do you know what kind of people you are going to be best at reaching? Look at the people you have! They are a clue as to who your church is reaching now. Start with that. Not the group you were hoping for? You might need to make some changes. Our church gets a lot of families with children. Why? We make sure that we do a good job with our children’s programs. We get a lot of people who are brand new to church. Why? We try and make an environment that will attract people who are trying to figure out who Jesus is and what the church is all about. We don’t get a lot of people who really love to sing traditional hymns. Why? We worship with very contemporary music. But three of the other churches in the community sing traditional hymns and I praise God for that. Because the other churches are being who God called them to be, maintaining the best of church traditions and singing the good old hymns, our church doesn’t have to. Our church can be what God is calling us to be and we can happily send people who are looking for something else to one of the other churches.
Who are you trying to reach? Take some time to think about it, and in our next article we will talk about ways to reach them.
Category: Church Growth Consulting, Church Growth Ideas
