All Posts Tagged With: "outreach"
Church Growth Consulting presents - The Rabbit and the Elephant
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.
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The Rabbit and the Elephant: Releasing the Mega Impact of Micro Churches By Tony Dale, Felicity Dale & George Barna / Tyndale House
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Blessing the Whole Church
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 Night of Thanks
The fall provides some great opportunities for outreach to your community. We have already discussed the benefits of establishing a fall festival at your church. Another opportunity to bring some new people to your facility exists at Thanksgiving. Remember that one of the things we need to do is to bring people through the imaginary boundary that many people perceive around your church. Once we can get them in for an event, we have a much better chance of having them come for a church service.
Since Thanksgiving is usually a family event, we don’t recommend holding an event on Thursday. We encourage our people who want to do something on Thanksgiving to volunteer at one of the food kitchens in the county. We promote an event on the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving called a “Night of Thanks”. Like all of our outreach events, we do this free of charge and we will not accept donations of any kind. What we use to attract people are “deep fried turkeys”. We deep fry about 40 turkeys, ask people in the church to volunteer to bring in the trimmings, and we invite the community to come for dinner.
We have 400-500 people show up every year. We eat dinner from 6:00 to 7:00 pm. From 7:00 to 8:00 pm our contempporary worship team plays. At 8:00 we provide dessert. We sort of keep the dessert hostage so people will stay and be a part of the concert. This event takes a lot of volunteers and there is a cost associated with the turkeys (it costs about $1000 for the turkeys and peanut oil), but this event always adds new people to the church.
At Church Growth Consulting we are always looking for any good ideas you have for outreach so please send them along to us. We hope that the Night of Thanks is a church growth idea you can use.
Building an Online Ministry - Part 1
We are going to build a complete online ministry together, incorporating a church web site, a pastor’s blog, outreach components, in-reach components, and all the bells and whistles. If it seems a little overwhelming, don’t worry, it’s all about perspective. We can make a little thing out of a big thing by walking you through the process stap by step. If you need a little extra help we can provide you with that as well. To get the project started I went to Good News Domains and purchased a domain name. The domain name I settled on was www.webministryonline.com. I paid $9.69 for the domain name. I could put together the complete online web ministry and never spend more than $9.69 a year. Good news Domains offers a free hosting service, but you have to deal with some advertising at the top of the site. I am going to take advantage of the free hosting for now, but later will probably upgrade. Even then I can choose an option for between five and nine dollars a month so the cost is really minimal. If you would like to read about getting a domain name I wrote an article about starting a blog on my evangelism site, My Newbie Blog. In that article you will get step by step instructions for getting your own domain name.
Web Ministry Online (www.webministryonline.com)
Why did I choose Web Ministry Online for the domain name? I am glad you asked. First, I was looking for a domain name that would fit well with what I wanted to accomplish. In order to set up all the various aspects of a web ministry I am going to take advantage of the sub domains that I can use with my web hosting. Rather than have to keep purchasing domain names and getting them web hosted, I can add sub-domains for free. So I will be adding a sub-domain for the church web site. It will be something like Christian Community Church. The URL for the sub-domain will then be http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. The Pastor’s blog will be something like http://pastorsteves.webministryonline.com. The youth group could have their own sub-domain. I will link the various sites together but each one will also act as a stand alone site.
Secondly, I also wanted a domain name that would search well on Google. That way I can generate some traffic from outside the church. “Web Ministry”, “Ministry Online” will be the keywords we will focus on as we write articles for the main site. With the sub-domain sites we will target keywords like, “pastors ministry online” or “church ministry online”. The domain name provides us with a lot of flexibility.
Thirdly, if we need to, we can purchase a domain name for the church and point it at the sub-domain site we create. This way we only have to pay another $10 a year and people can use a URL that is easier than http://christiancommunitychurch.webministryonline.com. This Church Growth site operates as a sub-domain of my main web ministry site Internet Pastor Online. The actual URL for this site is http://churchgrowthsoftwareconsulting.internetpastoronline.com. No one would ever type that in. Most of the people that come to this site find it as the result of a keyword search and so the domain name being that long isn’t that important. I did however purchase a domain name www.churchgrowthblog.com which is easy to remember and which points to this site. Here is what the site looks like now. In our next article we will create some sub-domains and install some themes.
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