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.
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.
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.
