Winning Back the West
I love to say, “If you can see the harvest, you can take the risk.” The harvest is the vast number of people who live outside of the knowledge that God loves them. The risk is turning your church upside down and in-side-out to reach them. Every day Mainline Christianity becomes more marginalized and irrelevant. It’s time we changed […]
We’re At A Crossroads
Which Way to Turn? Mainline churches are at a crossroads – either they wake up to the major trend of our time or they will continue to be irrelevant or, worse yet, go out of existence. What trend am I talking about? I’m talking about multiplication. Instead of struggling to stay afloat mainline church leaders should […]
Why Seniors Should “Do Church”
This post comes to us through guest-blogger Jason Lewis. Although much of our energy is focused on reaching younger adults and families, according to the Census Bureau, there are more than 40-million USAmericans over sixty-five years old … and less than 12-million are active in a church. And so, we thought we’d share this post […]
Five Steps to Encourage a Guest’s Return Visit
An important step in the growth of any church is to do whatever you can to encourage your first time guests to return for a second week. Notice I use the word ‘guest’ not visitor. To treat first time attenders as a welcomed guest, there are five things I would like to suggest that you […]
Can This Church Turnaround? Case Study #1
Established: ~1904 Tribe: Protestant Mainline Worship Style: Rural traditional, family informal Congregational Demographics: AWA: 32 Trend: 20 years steep decline; 8 years slow decline; followed by 10 years slight decline Median Age: 61 Adult Generations: 21 Builders+; 8 Boomers; 2 Gen-X; 1 Millennial Children/Youth: 2–3 Ethnic Mix: Anglo SES: Mixed, mostly blue collar; income […]
Advertising the Church
We live in a marketing-saturated world. The number of ads you see every single day is up in the thousands now (in the 1970s you would have seen about 500 a day … today it’s at about 5000 a day – CBS News). With that in mind, it’s no wonder the church is finding it […]