The Church Answers Podcast
Three Unconventional (But Highly Effective) Ways to Get Your Community to Come to Your Church
(upbeat music) - Welcome to a special edition series, three podcasts. Special series sponsored by Upward. We love Upward. We love the fact that we have had a relationship with them at church answers, ministry partnership for some time now. And we absolutely love the feedback that we're getting from people that have gone to Upward, utilized Upward resources as a result of our recommendation. We're going to continue to do so. And these three podcasts are special series sponsored specifically by Upward. Probably by this time you've heard us talk about Upward, but in case you didn't, if you really want to reach the community, if you really want to reach new families, if you really want to know what is going on with those that are not coming to your church, by partnering with Upward, you will have unique player packages. You can choose the sport that you want to use, access their ministry resources, devotions, coach, gospel materials. And here's the thing about it. They bring a sports program to you. You may not have a gym, but you probably have a parking lot. If you don't have a parking lot, you probably have a feel somewhere. Whatever you have, they can transform that into a sports league or a sports team that will allow you to reach people who are emphatic about having their kids or themselves involved in sports. Now here's even more good news. 2024, Upward is offering a startup grant of $500 only through church answers. Let me say that one more time. They're offering a startup grant through church answers of $500. So when you go and sign up for Upward and you tell them you want to get involved in sports through your ministry, through your church, or a church league, tell them you heard about the $500 offer at church answers, or you can just put league in there and they will keep you that grant. It's an incredible thing. You can see all the links, the show notes. We love what Upward is doing. This is an evangelistic ministry that I think every church should take advantage of one way or the other. And we thank them for sponsoring this. And I thank you for being a part of this particular podcast. So this is a special series. We're going to go through three different aspects of reaching people. And we're going to talk about those that are less conventional than what we typically hear. Now you asked this question. Now this is of course rhetorical. You haven't asked the question. Tom, how do you find out how well these work? Well, you got to understand, we do countless numbers of consultations every year. Incredible numbers of coaching calls, probably in the thousands would be my guest with church leaders. And then we have this ongoing community culture at Chancellor Central where we're responding to people who get 24/7 responses from us. Now I want to say us, I mean, it's not a bite. It's not AI. It's Tom Rayner, Sam Rayner, Chuck Lawless, Matt, Matt, Matthew, I could go down the list, Brad. They're just, we are responding as you ask. And so we've got this wealth of information. And even though this is not a scientific survey, we feel like we pretty much have our fingers on the pulse of what is working in churches. And we do in this particular area because we are passionate about reaching people with the gospel. And when we hear of a church reaching people with the gospel, we report it to you through podcasts, through blogs, through webinars, numbers of ways. And we're going to be talking about that in this podcast. So stay tuned now, three unconventional, but highly effective ways to get your community to come to your church. Now did you hear what I said? To get your community to come to your church. Let's get into these. I'm gonna get three of them. The first one is our sponsor, Build Your Own Sports Ministry. I know you can build your own sports ministry and it does not have to be upward. But if you really want a resource, an organization that knows what they're doing, that knows how to reach the community, that can match you with the right type of sport to the community that you need to do right then and there, one of the things I would do right away is contact upward and tell them you wanna build your own sports ministry at your church. And don't forget about that $500 grant that is there. Let me just mention one other thing about upward, if I'm out. You need to start planning your winter sports leagues now. So if you're listening to me and you say, you know, Tom's right, I really need to do more to get involved in sports to reach our community. Well, now's the time to start planning for your winter sports league. So I wanna connect this all to our sponsor and this first point. But I was pastor of your church that has an incredible, to call it a gym would be an understatement, but it was an incredible facility. And we started off doing pretty well, reaching our community, but over time, it just kinda began to move toward a in-house only usage. And I could only imagine if I'd had the smarts back then to call upward and to get them to come organize my sports team, how incredible it would have been. So yeah, you can build your own sports ministry, but we're often complaining, maybe we're whining just a little bit about all of our church members who go to Sunday sports or go on sports leagues and they take them away from church. Why don't you do something differently? Why don't you do the sports league so the people will come to your church? And instead of capitulating to culture, use culture for a gospel advantage. So number one, build your own sports ministry. Now I'm gonna get a little bit away from sports ministry for number two, gifts for the neighborhood. We've talked about this quite a bit. I guess Sam Rayner and his church in Brandon, Florida, do it as well as anyone I have ever known, but it's thousands of churches that do this. They go give gifts in the neighborhood and they don't even knock on the door. Some of them do, but not all of them do, but they just put a gift in the neighborhood like it's St. Patrick's Day. They'll get small boxes of Lucky Charms and they'll put it in a gift bag and they'll put something about their church. And yeah, I don't know what they say. They don't necessarily say this, but they can say it'd be magically delicious for you to come see us. At maybe that's not theologically, right? I'm not so sure. They make certain that they are constantly giving gifts to the neighbors. Oh, the neighbor will say, I've visited you church 'cause you left us a gift. You hung it on our door. And it just reminded me that we hadn't been in church in a long time. I wanted to go to church here. My family was going through this problem. And when I got your gift, it made me want to call your particular number or go to your website. Now, here's some things that you need to remember. When you give gifts in the neighborhood, first of all, there's a high receptivity rate. That doesn't mean people are gonna come to your church immediately. But we know that they're going to be fascinated that a church actually gave away a gift and it does not have to be expensive. As a matter of fact, your members can even donate the gifts themselves. But you need to have an immediate contact information. I prefer churches actually get a text prayer line. Those are so inexpensive to be able to do. And someone can text their prayer request and you could respond immediately. That's one way. But the point is you don't know where that person is when they go to the door and see this gift bag hanging on their door. You don't know where they are spiritually, emotionally, mentally, be ready to receive their prayer request. That's another unconventional. But we're hearing it. It's a highly effective way to do gifts for the neighborhood. We actually have an entire resource on this at church answers. It's called the Good News Neighbors Toolkit. That's another way to do it. And you'll get a lot of instructions on that. If you just want something that's totally organized and done for you, that would be one alternative for you to do. So we should build your own sports league. That's number one. Number two, gifts for the neighborhood. And third, and finally, and of course, this is not an exhaustive list. But another unconventional way is to let people in your neighborhood know that you have prayed for them. How do you do that? You walk in your neighborhood, you pray for people within that home. You may not know them or see them. And after you get done praying, you just put a door hanger that you can print. And that door hanger said, we pray for you. Once again, you have that contact information. You have that information that allows you to contact them to contact you if they have a prayer need. Very important. So what do we have here? You want to reach your neighborhood? You want to reach your community? Build your own sports ministry. Again, we strongly commend upward to you. And now is the time to start planning for your winter sports league. So get to them as quickly as possible to get these plans in place. Secondly, gifts for the neighborhood. We did mention our resource, called the Good News Neighborhood Kit. And then the power we've prayed for you. I would even look at our resource, the Hope Initiative, because it has a lot about praying for people in the neighborhood. You just simply have to add a door hanger that says we prayed for you. These are just three ways that you can reach your community and you can reach them in a positive way. I commend these to you. These are things that we have heard from churches, mainly in North America, but certainly sometimes behind. And these are three things that any church can do at any time. Once again, we thank upward for being our special series sponsor, this three part series, aside from our regular podcast. And it is entitled, the special series from upward with this first one being three unconventional but highly effective ways to get your community to come to your church. We've got two more in this series. So I ask you to stand by, maybe get ready, 'cause we've already downloaded it for you. It's waiting for you. The next series is ready. We'll see you in the next episode. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)