Unfortunately for many churches, outreach is treated as a one-off, disconnected event. And that’s something we are committed to helping you change! Let’s dig a little deeper into this.
Meet James. Let’s imagine he came to your last evangelistic series. What we typically see is that if he doesn’t become a church member within 3 months of your event, in most cases, he will never hear from your church again … EVER.
The problem is the vast majority of people will not make the leap from attending an event to becoming a church member in that 3-month window. It is usually a much longer journey.
When we start working with churches, one of the first things we do is begin to consolidate all the people who have indicated interest in the church in the past (“past interests”) to help make it easier to reach out to them in the future. When we receive spreadsheets from churches with contact information and a few extra columns (at most) indicating how many times the church has followed up with past interests, that’s simply not enough.
Meet someone we’ll call Robert (name changed for anonymity). He attended a church’s Vacation Bible School in the 1970s … nearly 50 years ago! As far as we know, he hasn’t been back since. Then last year, he responded to a free book offer from the church, and the church heard nothing further … until a Bible worker at the time called him and invited him to a church event.
Guess what? Robert came! What did it take? A simple invitation—that’s it. And at the end of the event, Robert asked the Bible worker to continue inviting him back to more events! Wow!
This story just goes to show that people can have significant interest in a church that is years, or even decades long, but you may never know it if you don’t stay in continuous contact with them.
The old adage is true: “Out of sight, out of mind.” If we don’t stay in touch with people, we may let very interested individuals just fall through the cracks. And that is something none of us want to happen!
For starters, we must realize it’s a journey, And the great news is it’s never been easier than it is right now. Just think, 100 years ago, we pretty much had to hop on a horse or walk from town to town to stay in touch with people. Thankfully, it is much easier today!
A key concept to understand here is scalable vs. non-scalable types of communication. What is the difference?
Now please don’t take what I’m saying out of context. An email isn’t even remotely as powerful as a personal visit, a personal phone call, or a personal handwritten letter. And it never will! So, why does it matter at all?
Typically after we consolidate a church's past interests, on average, they have between 500¬–1,000 people already. It would be hard to visit that amount of people more than once or twice a year, right? While scalable communication isn’t meant to take away the hallmarks of evangelism, it can fill the gaps and maintain connection. That’s the point!
Here are some of the main forms of scalable communication that we see and use:
It is important to remember that people prefer to communicate in different ways. Some people never use social media. Others have thousands of emails piling up that they will never check.
Since there is no one way to reach everyone, we recommend a multi-faceted outreach approach using as many methods as sustainable.
If you feel overwhelmed, don’t. The easiest place for churches to start is with what they are already doing, and what’s even better is that churches do so many things! Think about it: If you have a weekly sermon, weekly Bible study, and weekly prayer meeting, you already have 156 events to invite people to in a year without doing anything extra. That’s a lot!
Churches have a constant stream of events, and these are all opportunities to reach out:
And this is just the tip of the iceberg!
Let’s look at an example of an individual’s journey from the beginning of their relationship with a church until they were recently baptized. First, members in the church delivered 20 Bible studies to their porch that they had requested (without ever meeting that individual).
As time went on, this person began engaging more with the church. They signed up for multiple events and attended two complete Revelation Seminars. As part of signing up for the events, they opted in to email and text messaging, so they began receiving weekly emails and text messages.
Before getting baptized, they had received over 150 emails, nearly 100 text messages, visited the church’s website over 100 times, and were personally contacted 15 times from individuals.
Lastly, they left a Facebook review about the church over two years before getting baptized and, up to the point of baptism, left over 40 comments on church social posts.
The point is evangelism is not a one-time event. For many churches, it looks like this:
The problem with this is:
But we think evangelism should look like this:
Rethinking our approach doesn’t mean replacing it. We just need to fill the gaps in sustainable ways. You never know when an interested individual may be one email or one phone call away from taking the next step. And when they are, we need to be there.
Now we have given you some reasons WHY you should be communicating regularly with everyone you know. And in future posts, we will discuss specific communication strategies that will help you stay in touch in the most effective and efficient ways. Make sure you don’t miss those future updates by subscribing!
And if we can be of help, we would love to work directly with your church. Just contact us and let’s have a conversation.
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Christopher Dellen