Church Growth | Software and Consulting

Church Growth Consulting presents - The Rabbit and the Elephant

stephenlawes — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:16:50 +0000

I was recently asked if I would be interested in reading a book titled, “The Rabbit and the Elephant” as part of a virtual book tour. I am always interested in books about church growth and church planting, so I agreed to take part in the process and write a review that I would post on my blog.

I have chosen my Church Growth Consulting site because I feel that the book has some great insights into church growth and church planting issues. I started the book with a little skepticism, because I pastor what the book might call a “legacy church”. However, as I dug into the book, the author’s (Tony and Felicity Dale) painted a picture of what “simple church” looked like and I felt as though it opened up a lot of new avenues for me to ponder. I don’t personally see the “simple church” idea as a complete replacement for “legacy churches”, but I can see a lot of potential for them to work side by side in the harvest field.

Chapter 13 provides a great discussion on Luke 10 principles. When Luke 10 is looked at in light if the “simple church” process it seems to really fit well. I also enjoyed reading the chapter called “Stories From the Harvest”. The story about the “Church at Table Number Two” reminded me of some of my own missionary/church planting experiences. We had started churches that met in funny places and we gave them names to match. One of them was called “Light Bulb Church” because we started that church by stringing an electric cord with a light bulb in the center of it between two apartment buildings that were about fifteen feet apart. We had another church we started we called “Garage Church” because they met in a garage.

One of the biggest advantages I found in reading the book was the challenge to not get stuck in our definitions of what a church “is”. I have gotten used to starting small groups and home groups and affinity groups in my area with the idea of gradually assimilating the people gathered into our existing church. I am now thinking that the goal doesn’t need to include those people ever stepping foot in our church building. The goal is just to meet people where they are and get them o step into the Kingdom.

“The Rabbit and The Elephant” by Tony and Felicity Dale is a worthwhile addition to your reading list. It is a quick read and flows well. It also includes some interesting statistics from George Barna. One of the statistics that jumped out at me was that “the average Protestant church probably sees no converts in any given year”. That really shocked me! I hope you will read the book and I would be interested in having you comment about your thoughts as well. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the book, you can use the link below.

The Rabbit and the Elephant: Releasing the Mega Impact of Micro Churches
By Tony Dale, Felicity Dale & George Barna / Tyndale House

Free Lunch Follow Up

stephenlawes — Sat, 28 Mar 2009 03:36:51 +0000

Here on Church Growth Consulting we thought we should do a follow up article on the Free Lunch article we wrote earlier to tell you how things went. The Free Lunch was a great success. We got permission to use a bank parking lot on the highway near a busy intersection. We went over at about 8:30 AM and set up tables and chairs under a few canopys that we have. We set up two grills and brought some serving tables. We had 120 hamburger patties and buns and 80 big hot dogs and buns along with all the trimmings. We had 6 cases of water/soda and 5 cases of potato chips. We made four sets of big posters that said “Free Lunch” and “No Kidding”. We also had about 30 volunteers who showed up to help with the outreach. The last and most important detail was a small flyer that we taped inside of each of the to go boxes we served in. It said, “Wow, there really is such a thing as a free lunch…” ” I wonder what else might be true? John 3:16″.

At 10:45 we prayed and then we sent 8 people out with signs on the highway. The response was fast and immediate. In sixty minutes we had to pull the signs off the road and by Noon we had served two hundred people. We got some amazing feedback and we had people who came to church over the weekend becasue of the outreach. We also had the local radio station talking about what we were doing! This is a great outreach and I would recommend it to all of you. The cost for the outreach was about $300 (three hundred dollars) but it was well worth it. We are going to do it again soon, but we will double up on the food so that we can a little longer next time.

Blessing the Whole Church

stephenlawes — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 04:09:22 +0000

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.

A Valentine Outreach

stephenlawes — Sun, 15 Feb 2009 20:36:48 +0000

Here is a Church Growth idea you might like to try at your church. Every year at this time we do our Valentine Outreach project. It is one of the most simple of the year and it is always very well received and it is very easy for the entire church to get involved. The project requires a lot of Hershey’s Kisses (I usually buy them in bulk at a GFS or Sam’s Club, etc. to get the cheapest price), some small plastic bags (a little bit bigger than a business card), a simple Act of Kindness card that says “Just our way of showing God’s love in a practical way” on one side of the card, and the name, location, and phone number of your church on the other.

Two weeks before valentines day get a handful of volunteers to come to the church and put together the valentines package. In the small plastic bag you place one act of kindness card and three or four Hershey’s Kisses.

Put all the packages in a big container and then have it by the exit on the weekend before Valentines Day. Tell the church you want them to take some of the giveaway packages on the way out so that they can give them to their friends and co-workers. I encourage people to take as many as they think they can give away. If there are any packages left I grab a couple of people and go to the local shopping area and we give them away there. They go quickly and are always well received and it is a good thing to give chocolate away on Valentines day. If you didn’t do anything this year, mark this one down and get it together for next year. After all, who doesn’t like Hershey’s Kisses?

Church Growth Consulting - 2009 SEO Experiment - Part 3

stephenlawes — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:48:53 +0000

On Church Growth Consulting we have joined up as part of a web ministry experiment to see how long it takes to get new sites established. This site is one of seven sites involved in the process. We think that if you follow along with the articles you can gain some significant real time insight into what it takes to get your web ministry started to help you with your church growth.

The site we have started and are reporting on is Church Marketing. Of all the sites in the experiment, this one is starting out the slowest. In its first month it hasn’t had any traffic and is not showing up on either Google or Yahoo. We have so far added 3 original articles to the site. Primarily we have been working on getting links to the site. For this site to eventually show up on page 1 of a Google search it will have to have 4000 to 5000 links just to start. We have been pointing some links to the site from here and we have also been building some online community with a few other sites. We are off to a good start with 752 in coming links in the first month. We use the link domain function on Yahoo to determine how many links a site has.

In February we will be working on adding more content to the site and we will be introducing another link building concept. We will start the process of article marketing. What that means is that we will write a unique article about church marketing and we will submit it to various websites and blogs to be published. Each time a site picks up the article it will give us two links back to the site. We will demonstrate the process and then report on the results in future articles on Church Growth Consulting. If you are interested in reading about what is happening to all the sites in the experiment vist the Web Ministry Online site.

Starting a Blog for Evangelism

stephenlawes — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 23:23:12 +0000

One of the things we hope to accomplish on Church Growth Consulting is to encourage people to use the Internet to help people with not only their own church growth, but to help encourage church growth all over the world. One of the ways to accomplish this is by starting blogs and websites that will appeal to to not only Christians, but also to pre-Christians. A well chosen topic can provide opportunities to develop online relationships with people from all over the world and then develop opportunities to share the Good News of Jesus Christ. By applying some simple SEO (search engine optimization) strategies and a little bit of time, we can create sites that will be found on the search engines and provide us with a steady stream of new people to reach for the Gospel. As a demonstration of this principle we are starting a site called Political Events. We will be working on this site to get a strong placement on the search engine results and a steady flow of traffic.

To get the site started we purchased a domain name from Good News Domains, (www.politicalevents.org), we took advantage of the free hosting plan (we will deal with the advertising banner across the header as this will allow us to operate the site for the cost of the domain name, which is $10/year), and we installed WordPress.

To give the site some foundation, we added RSS feeds from Political sites and some news sites as well. We also included video feeds about politics and current events. Here is what the site looks like today:

We will be working on the site by adding content and building links. Once the site is established on the search engines we will start developing ways to utilize the site for the Kingdom of God and world wide church growth.

Acts of Kindness Make an Impact

stephenlawes — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 21:19:17 +0000

I came across a fascinating video the other day by “Penn” of Penn and Teller. Penn is an avowed atheist but in this video he shares about an act of kindness that was shown to him by a believer and it obviously impacted him. He says something that is really thought provoking. He says, (and I am paraphrasing), “If you believe you have the truth about eternal life, if you don’t share it with people, then you must really hate them”. He actually says some things that everyone who is a believer needs to hear about how important sharing our faith is. I will include the video here on the Church Growth Consulting site for you:

I believe the video is very thought provoking. I would enjoy reading your comments so be sure to add them below.

SEO and Web Ministry

stephenlawes — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 19:01:06 +0000

Here on Church Growth Consulting we are always working on ways to help people and churches develop and expand their web ministry. There are three big factors in having your websites and blogs do well on the search engines; time, content, and links. We are always experimenting to see how much we can learn about the interactions between these three components and the different search engines. We have an ongoing experiment tight now which involves seven or eight different websites. Besides all that we are also tinkering with the impact of links from the sidebar of a site and directly from articles on the site. It seems that sites that are linked to from articles get a bigger boost than just being linked to from the sidebar. With that in mind we are going to track eightenn sites that we started on our sister site, Church Webmaster. Here is a list of the sites we will be looking at:

A Google search for each of the sites today produced the following results:

The Cape Coral Florida Churches is currently in position twenty-three. It has never been a page one return. The Clearwater Florida Churches site is at position seven. This site has spent most of its time on page two so this is an improvement. The Florida Keys Churches has been at position one for the last three months and enjoys a steady traffic flow. The Gainesville Florida Churches site has just recently moved to page one and is in position eight. The Lakeland Florida Churches is sitting at position twenty-two. The Ocala Florida Churches is in position three and has been there for several months. It also receives a steady traffic flow. The Fresno California Churches has moved in to position three in the last month. The Fremont California Churches site is in position twelve. The Oceanside California Churches site is in position seven. The Springfield Oregon Churches site is in position three. The Hillsboro Oregon Churches site is in position eight. The Salem Oregon Churches is in position eleven. It was a solid page one return but has started to drift backwards. The Federal Way Washington Churches is doing very well at position two. The Flagstaff Arizona Churches site is in position eight. The Glendale Arizona Churches site is in position fifteen. This is after being a page one return for a long time. The Scottsdale Arizona Churches site has really fallen back, moving from page one to page six in position fifty-four. The Tempe Arizona Churches site is holding on ot position eight. The Gilbert Arizona Churches site has moved back to position 14 from a solid page one return.

We will continue to track the progress of these sites on Church Growth COnsulting as we point some article links at each of them over the next couple of weeks and we will check back in on the progress of the sites then.

The Problem with Church Signs

stephenlawes — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 20:59:26 +0000

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 2

stephenlawes — Wed, 31 Dec 2008 03:18:20 +0000

In this article we will continue to record the progress of the web ministry experiment we are participating in here on Church Growth Consulting. Our task in the web ministry experiment is to develop and record the progress of a site called Church Marketing. We have the site up and running and indexed by Google. We have added a tracking software so that we can track any traffic that might come to the site to see if there is any keyword search that works that we might not be aware of.

We did our first Google search for “Church Marketing” since the site was indexed and we found the new site. Check it out:

The site is showing up in position 195 on page 20. We have a lot to do to get the site to move up to page 1. This initial position doesn’t mean much. The site could easily disappear from the search engines at any time while it is this new. That particular phenomenon is called sand boxing and it often happens to new sites. We will have to watch and see what happens.

We will now start working on the things that we can do to help the site with the search engines. We will add content (informative articles about church marketing), and we will start developing links. To be competitive with this keyword we will have to develop 3000-4000 links for the site. This will take a considerable amount of work over a significant amount of time

In future articles we will begin to chronicle our link building efforts. For now, we are going to work on writing five good articles for the site over the next week or two. We will be using the Google search engine as our main barometer for how well the site is doing. While it would be a good thing to get the site showing up on Yahoo and MSN, they don’t produce nearly as much traffic as a page 1 return on Google.