Tune in to this the most recent episode of our Lunch and Learn Podcast with Kenny Jahng.
Kenny will share about the article he read from Dan Reiland’s blog. Dan is XP at 12 Stone Church. He knows a bunch of things about healthy growing churches. And he’s got an article that just came out. It’s called Five Ways to Help People See The Value in Attending Your Church which is what Kenny will discuss.
Links mentioned:
TRANSCRIPTION
Hey, friends. Welcome to another edition of the Church Butler Lunch and Learn. Today, wanted to take a ride across the internet’s to Dan Reiland personal blog. If you don’t know Dan Reiland is the XP at 12 Stone Church, I believe the largest Wesleyan church in the country. They’re located down in Lawrenceville, Georgia. And Dan has a wide variety of experiences. He was also part of the enjoy stewardship team. And so he knows a bunch of things about healthy growing churches. And he’s got an article that just came out. It’s called Five Ways to Help People See The Value in Attending Your Church. And I thought, I just want to highlight a couple of things here. He gets this completely right from a communicator’s perspective. I’ve always said that you need to communicate to people why they should be attending a church, not just communicate. They should be attending a church. He has a click to tweet here. The people who attend your church need to experience the benefit of attending a church. Why? What is the benefit?
What’s with them, what’s in it for me? And so he’s got these five ideas. One is, lead church like you value the church. Would you attend your own church if you didn’t have to? If you do, if you didn’t have to? This is a great question. I actually have been in consultation with two churches recently where the majority of their staff under 35 are not even attending their own church. That is a warning signal. That’s something that just a yellow flag, it’s a red flag, that if your leaders are not wanting to to attend the your own church, there’s something wrong there. Second, he says, want more people, want more for your people then from your people. I think this is actually probably the number one problem, PR problem, perception problem, maybe the reality problem of most communities that once you start to get plugged into a church, you realize that it’s all about take, take, take, take, take from you and not give or receive.
And you need to really learn how to demonstrate in ministry that your church is for the people, not your people are for you. And more importantly for the people outside of your church. A number three, make sure your hospitality and your customer is top notch. I think that’s a no brainer. In today’s day and age, the competition for the Sunday morning, hour until we have the next generation of reformation that breaks out of the mold and realizes that Sunday morning is not the only time that we should be focused on having church worship services. We need to figure out a way to really display some genuine hospitality and genuine customer service. Something that’s visitor centric, not regular centric. Number four, select the ministry focus to major in. Now, this is one of the most interesting things that Dan talks about that we don’t hear in many of the conversations with us, or at least I have not heard of.
And what he’s saying is that, I think the desire is that every church wants to be the church for everybody. When you say who’s your church for the answer is everybody, anybody and everybody in the zip code. We just want them to come in and we’ve got something for them. Anyone from birth to death, we want them to be part of the church. But that really is not the case for most organizations. It’s very hard to cater to cradle to grave and be a ministry or an organization that has excellence across all of that. And so what he is saying here, that you actually might have that dream and be aspirational. You might think that you are one of these mega churches that have solved every problem across the board, which in reality is not once you get closer to these even large mega churches.
But, he’s saying start with one ministry at a time, figure out how it should be working and then close the gap between the way it is working to how it should be. You don’t want any ministry to be substandard, sloppy or ineffective in his mind. So, um, you know, most often the best churches are known for particular code stand out strength in ministry, right? Whether it be kids ministry, it might be the outreach ministry, it might be the preaching ministry. There’s some ministry in particular that’s the tip of the sword. He’s saying major in that, invest in one ministry first and then you can rise and bring up everything else after that. It’s about sequence and priority, folks, sequence and priority. And the last one is, number five, make it all about life change. I think that is something that is for cotton and in most churches across America.
It’s really sad if you look at some of the numbers that I saw recently of, I started list of a mainline denominational churches that had vacancies and enlisted stats about every single church and about the vacancies. And it listed the number of baptisms. And most of them had either two or less. Many of them had zero baptisms the last year, the last two years after the last two years were listed. And so if you are not figuring out how to even change the life of the people that you are ministering to with the love of Christ, the message and the promise of Christ, then there’s something else that is fundamentally wrong before you can even look at increasing attendance and growth, etc.
And so here is another great click to tweet here is help people see the value in attending church by inspiring them toward life change through Christ, which is completely true.
And this is where I say you need to have case studies and testimonials. Those two categories of messaging needs to be something in your arsenal that you’re constantly collecting. You’re constantly curating and you’re constantly publishing to show the benefit to a non-church goer of why they should be attending a church. Help people see the value of why they should be attending a church. The people who attended church need to experience the benefit of attending a church. Once they get there so that they can tell others and more importantly for them to come back to your church as repeat attenders and hopefully become members of your community. So, that’s a great article. You can dive in deeper into what he says about each. Dan Reiland, the pastor’s coach, developing church leaders. Just a shout out for his blog. If you want to go visit his blog, he is doing fantastic work down at 12 stone in the Atlanta, Georgia area.
If you’re ever in the area, I would totally suggest that you visit the ministry, even reach out to Dan. But this is one of the favorite blogs and this is one that caught my attention this week as I was reviewing all the content that comes across the interwebs about church growth, discipleships, stewardship, etc.
We’d love to hear what you’re reading, what’s piquing your interest, what’s catching your eye, because I’d love to share that resources to others. There’s one place that I’d like to point out today and that is our Facebook group. It’s called Social Media for Churches with Church Butler. If you just look it up on Facebook, social media for churches, that Facebook group is the place to have more conversations like this and sharing resources, tips, etc. We’d love for you to hop in there and interact and engage and that’s the way I’d love to meet you and have more personal interactions about this topic, about other topics and about social media in general for the church and the kingdom. I’m Kenny Jahng. Thanks for listening to today’s episode of the Lunch and Learn. Hopefully it’ll be not too long before the next one we will have another guest sharing about a case study that I’m trying to convince someone that I know to come on and share the nitty gritty details of how they’re being successful on Instagram. But in the meantime, check out the blog, check out the site and check out our Facebook group, social media for churches on Facebook. I’m Kenny Jahng. Thanks for listening to the podcast today, the Church Butler Lunch and Learn podcasts. I’ll check it here in the next time. Thanks.
HIGHLIGHTS:
01:43 One is, lead church like you value the church. Would you attend your own church if you didn’t have to?
02:16 Second, he says, want more people, want more for your people then from your people.
02:42 And you need to really learn how to demonstrate in ministry that your church is for the people, not your people are for you. And more importantly for the people outside of your church.
03:31 Number four, select the ministry focus to major in. Now, this is one of the most interesting things that Dan talks about that we don’t hear in many of the conversations with us, or at least I have not heard of.
And what he’s saying is that, I think the desire is that every church wants to be the church for everybody. When you say who’s your church for the answer is everybody, anybody and everybody in the zip code. We just want them to come in and we’ve got something for them. Anyone from birth to death, we want them to be part of the church.
05:27 And the last one is, number five, make it all about life change. I think that is something that is for cotton and in most churches across America.
06:05 And so if you are not figuring out how to even change the life of the people that you are ministering to with the love of Christ, the message and the promise of Christ, then there’s something else that is fundamentally wrong before you can even look at increasing attendance and growth, etc.
06:27 And so here is another great click to tweet here is help people see the value in attending church by inspiring them toward life change through Christ, which is completely true.
06:39 this is where I say you need to have case studies and testimonials. Those two categories of messaging needs to be something in your arsenal that you’re constantly collecting. You’re constantly curating and you’re constantly publishing to show the benefit to a non-church goer of why they should be attending a church.
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