All Posts Tagged With: "consulting"

Free Lunch Follow Up

March 27th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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″.

bbq

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.

Starting a Blog for Evangelism

January 26th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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:

politicalevents450
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

January 17th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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

January 16th, 2009 • stephenlawes • 0 comments • Related • Filed Under

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.

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