Confessions of a Shiftless Mind

I finally got my ethics review approved, so I have the official go-ahead to begin field research on my final project.

So, I started poring over the list of churches in my target communities, when I was hit with insight #1 - how few churches have websites.

I mean, really! These people are trying to grow churches in highly technological, young demographic communities and hardly any of them have websites!

I don’t want to be derogatory, but if I was living in one of these places and I was thinking about going to church, I would check the web first. It would largely inform my decision. If the church had a website but it was antiquated, that would tell me a lot about the church’s approach to people like me. If it was nonexistent, that tells me the church has no interest AT ALL in reaching out to anyone in touch with technology. It’s like they are trying to be insular.

I know being a pastor is a hectic gig even if you only have a few congregants and you can’t be a jack of ALL trades. But it takes so little effort to make even a basic website. Surely there will be one or two congregants (or maybe their kid) who can help with it. Heck, if nothing else, sign up for a free wordpress account! At least it gives you something.

Insight #2 - how similar church planting is to real estate sales skills. It takes a gregarious person with a wide social network to be successful. It requires the professional to have marketing skills, and lots of them, while not having any formal training in marketing (although I’ll bet someone who was in a marketing career before choosing full time ministry as a vocation would do amazing). It requires databases and administration skills of a people person.

Now, they are very different careers in the final analysis. It could be said that evangelism is like selling - in fact, I see sales nomenclature shifting in that direction as companies hire “evangelists” to promote their products. It may have even gone overboard in this way in the past as evangelists seek the “close” (the salvation prayer) but like traditional sales models, abandon the customer once they have their money (most Christians aren’t after money, but souls, but the problem is we have been ignoring the “make disciples and teach” part of Matthew 28). But, there are some similarities.