Media Outreach

As a church planter, I find myself often asking the question, “What are growing churches doing differently from their declining counterparts?” Those are the things I want to encourage my team to focus on in their dealings with our church family and, especially, with the people of our community. I was amazed, this week, when I read an article in REV! Magazine that shared these statistics:

• Only 56% of local churches responded to email requests for more information about their church.

• Only 54% of churches called or mailed info after receiving a personal letter requesting information.

• Only 38% of churches returned phone calls from a potential parishioner, which consisted of a voice mail left on an answering system outside of office hours, requesting information about the church.

I hope you were as shocked by these numbers as I was. There is something wrong with our system, if we can only field half of the requests for information we receive. I am blessed to be a web outreach consultant here at faithHighway, and I know, for a fact, that those kinds of response rates are not acceptable within our company. In fact, I can’t think of any industry in the marketplace that would find these kinds of statistics acceptable. The fact that this is the case in the church, a place where we hold the answers to life’s most important questions, is something that we need to repair immediately.

I took this information to our church staff right away and expressed to them what, I believe, God was placing on my heart. We need to improve our communication as a whole. What we do, as the spiritual leaders of our community, is too important to let people fall through the cracks.