Is your church ready for Visitors?

March 8, 2013March 8, 2013Leave a comment

Is your church entrance sending the message that visitors are welcome?

In the New Year people will visit new churches, try out new ministries and attend prayer meetings. So it is likely that there will be visitors hanging around your church buildings this month and next month. So what do you think the church buildings look like? Now try to think how new people will see them. We need to tidy up the church buildings in the same way that we would clean up our home if we thought visitors were dropping in.

Recently we invited neighbours to come to our place for lunch and we thought we better clean the place up. Looking at our house from the perspective of a visitor I noticed a whole lot of mess piled up on our front porch. For weeks I had walked past it without noticing it but with visitors coming over I paid more attention to the details. Most of the items just needed to be put away so the place looked tidy.

The same is true for your church buildings. Recently I visited a church foyer that was spotless and had clear signage telling me (a visitor) where to go. However I also attended a church where the foyer was a mess, it still had Christmas items laying around in February. Sometimes we need to imagine our church through the eyes of a visitor and here are a few things they will notice:

Can I find the correct room? It is so important to a first time visitor that they can find the room they are supposed to be in. Try to think like a first time visitor, is it really obvious which door they should enter? If not then you need to have a person or sign directing people where to go. Can parents find the kids ministry room? Can young people find the youth group in the various rooms on your site?
Where are the toilets? Often people will ask where the toilets are so it isn’t a big deal but if they are really hard to find then put up a sign. Often visitors will go to the toilet before your service because they are nervous about how long the service will take.
Is the space tidy? A visitor should not have to see decoration failing down or mess from a previous event. Have the musicians kept their area tidy or is it a mess? Is the hospitality area clean? Are the toilets clean? Are there tidy facilities for parents to change a nappy?
Stay up to date – replace any old posters or out of date event material. Make sure that the bulletins from each week are put in the recycling bin. One church I visited had flyers for a theological college that were five year out of date.
Less is better – don’t try to fill your foyer or notice board. If a space is too cluttered then the mix of things confuses people and everything blends in. Instead of trying to advertise every ministry event in your district, give clear message to visitors about what you would like them to attend. One church I visited just put up new notice boards and they filled it with at least 50 ministry events across the city to the point that their own ministry events got lost in the noise.
Where is the coffee? If you go to the effort of putting on tea and coffee make sure that visitors know where to find it. Don’t expect them to follow the crowd; they will most likely avoid the crowd and go to their car.

Every time we have visitors to our house we hope that they love our home as much as we do. The same is true with our church buildings except we want them to love our church not the buildings. Richard Riesling in his book on Church Marketing says that visitors have made many decisions about your church before the service even begins, make sure that they are the right decisions.

markoffaith, Mark of Faith, mark of faith, mrmarkmcdonald, markoffaith.net

How to start something new in your ministry

February 4, 2013October 16, 20131 Comment

At the start of every year churches seem ready to start something new. The New Year brings a new season in your ministry rather than more of the same old routine. Perhaps there is a ministry that was needed last year that you didn’t have the energy for or perhaps there wasn’t space in your program to start something new. With the New Year comes new energy and we all think we can take on more projects. So if you find yourself thinking this way this post will help you through the process.

With over 10 years experience in ministry consultancy, most people underestimate the time and effort it takes to start a new ministry. Many ministry leaders hope to get something started with a few weeks preparation when really it takes months to prepare for a new start. Recently I was reading a 2012 strategic plan for a church which included plans for a start up ministry in 2014. In ministry we have to cautious of being inspired to start a new ministry on our holiday and hoping it is fully running the second week we get back.

As many of us begin our ministries after the long summer holiday break, here are a few tips to starting something new in your church this year:

Narrow the focus – once you start planning to begin something new everyone wants to be included more than you had planned so you have to keep a narrow focus. So a new junior high ministry shouldn’t include senior students as participants. The new music team should also double as a bible study. Don’t try to bite off too much when you first start a new element within your ministry; you can always broaden the focus later but it is harder to cut back as you launch.
Prepare, Prepare, Prepare – there is such a tendency to launch something and work out the details later. If you don’t prepare fully then you won’t be ready when you launch which will turn visitors off. When we were starting a junior ministry in one of the churches we took six months to prepare even though we had 20 young people ready to go. We needed time to prepare the first six months of talks, themes and research appropriate activities.
Ride through the dip – six months into every start up the ministry hits a dip in numbers or energy, perhaps due to a lack of money, leaders or participants get bored. What will be the dip in your ministry? Seth Godin in his book “The Dip” believes that most start ups fail because they don’t know how to ride through the dip; those that ride through the dip are the ones that succeed. Perhaps your dip will come in six weeks perhaps it will come in two years but you must ride through the dip in energy and numbers to be successful.
Marketing is important – In his book on Church Marketing, Richard Riesling says that marketing is managing perception. With any new element in your ministry you have to manage the perception that others have of what the ministry is about. In the start up of our junior youth group we called it Blaze to evoke the image of a faith that is on fire for God; and we didn’t mention or offer pizza even once. Mange the perception of your new venture so that people know this is long term and not a flash in the pan idea.
Who will lead it when you are gone – perhaps you don’t need to answer this question before you begin unless you are planning on leaving within six months. But from the very beginning you need to start training and preparing your replacement. In fact sometimes other leaders won’t put their hand up until you are a success so start anyway.
Have fun – starting a new ministry is a lot of work but it is so much fun. Everyone gets excited and there is so much enthusiasm towards something new. Enjoy this time and have fun serving your ministry.

It is important for us to be looking ahead to see how we can start something new this year that will meet the needs of people next year and into the future. We can’t wait until our current programs fizzle out before we look to the horizon to see what is next. Perhaps this year is a year of transition for you and your ministry, I hope and prayer that God leads you where you need to be.

Please leave a comment about how you have started a new ministry.

markoffaith, MarkofFaith, mrmarkmcdonald, Mark McDonald, markoffaith.net

Is your ministry getting ready for Christmas?

September 26, 2012Leave a comment

Is it really time to be thinking about Christmas, it is only September? Before you panic, this post is about working on your environment now so that you are welcoming community by Christmas. We know that many people come back to church for Christmas so you need to start working on creating a welcoming environment so that you can keep them into the new year.

It is a well known that attendance numbers drop off during the winter months, especially at Sunday night services. People think it is too cold or too dark to got out, it might be raining or they want to somewhere warmer than a cold church building. So it is likely that your ministry has dropped a few people over the winter months but now is the time to start welcoming them back. Just as the trees and plants spring to new life around this time, perhaps the ground work you do during September and October will prepare you for a growth period over December, January and February.

Here are a few common sayings in ministry and how you might need to address these at the moment:

People always come back to Church at Christmas: each parish has a group of Christmas and Easter Christians that you will see coming back to church this Christmas. Whilst you might not like it but if you don’t ask then they won’t come; if you are not welcoming then they won’t stay. Recently I heard that the biggest growth group in Australia is the unchurched who don’t love or hate the church; they just have never been asked. We often listen to the vocal minority who are vocal about their opposition to the Church but the majority of Australians don’t hate the church; some of them will return this Christmas.
Vision leaks: has your ministry grown tired and lost the energy that it had in the beginning of the year? Whilst you might know where you are heading you need to tell the people in your ministry as the vision leaks. Some leaders say that when you get sick of reminding people of where you are heading then people are just starting to get it. For more on this topic check out the article, Where are you heading?
Good habits drop easily but take months to re-establish: perhaps you were a welcoming church at the start of the year but with no new people coming over the winter your team lost the habits associated with a welcoming church. So in the coming months you need to re-establish these habits so that it comes naturally when the Christmas season rolls around. For more on this check out this article, Creating a Welcoming Church.
Narrow the Focus: whilst you might want to stir up energy by adding new programs to excite people you probably need to narrow the focus rather than widen it. Sometimes people get confused with where they should put their focus, as the leader you need to target one or two things for people to focus on. Don’t bring in 50 strategies for creating a welcoming church, perhaps just work on a good greeting before the service/event and unexpected hospitality after the service or event.
Good branding just makes bad products fail faster: if you spend a lot of time and effort on marketing your service and events without improving them then they will only fail faster. Some leaders wait until people turn up to start improving things, which only shows new people how bad things really are. Improve your Sunday services and midweek events first then invite people to experience the revamp.
A good spring clean makes for a good summer: perhaps this is more a gardening image than a ministry one but I think it applies well here. Some teams plan to leave all their cleaning up for the “downtime” in January but that is when you need to be taking a break and a holiday. January is not just about your members taking a holiday, you need one as well. Perhaps a good spring clean in September and October will bring much needed focus and energy ready for the Christmas season when people feel like coming back to church.

So whilst you might think it is too early to think about Christmas, just remember that you need to give November over to thinking about the New Year, which I will post on shortly. If you need to start your planning for next year in October and November then it is better to start preparations for Christmas now. Remember we are not just talking about the Christmas Service but the welcoming atmosphere that you hope comes naturally around that time. A little bit of extra work now will reap better results for your ministry come Christmas.

Please leave a comment about how you are getting ready for the Christmas rush.

Youth Ministry and the disposable razor theory

September 17, 20122 Comments

We all know that young people are growing up in an era where new consumer products launch or are updated on a constant basis. With the launch of the iPhone 5 last week there will be millions of consumers desperate to get of their current phone contracts just so they can have the latest phone. In the current marketplace we see many good products relegated to the scrap heap every month just because the latest version is released. We can trace all of this back to the theory of the disposable razor.

Traditionally a man would buy one high quality razor to shave their face every morning. The good blades would last a lifetime, which the manufacturer thought was bad for business. It was in the interest of the manufacturer to make blades that needed replacing so that people would have to buy more product. Thus the creation of the disposable razor blade; a company would make more money over the long term selling thousands of cheap items than selling one high quality razor.

Fast forward through the years and we see that many products lowered their quality so that people would have to buy more products. Many products developed component parts that needed replacing so as to sell more products; before digital cameras Kodak made more money from selling film than they did by selling cameras. The disposable razor theory originally applied to low cost and low quality items. In recent years the disposable or replaceable concept has been getting more and more expensive. What do people do with their old mobile phone when they buy the new iPhone 5? When did a $700 phone become as disposable as a $2 razor blade?

Young people today want the latest technology which is totally understandable. If I needed to buy a new phone or laptop then I would buy the best I could afford too. However, the rate of change in consumer products is creating a transient culture where young people move from product to product without much loyalty. Whilst the disposable razor theory was always about products it seems that it is now affecting organisations also. Sporting clubs find it harder to keep junior players for more than a few seasons. Scouting groups find it hard to attract young people because it asks for a weekly commitment rather than random participation.

In the Church we too are affected by the transient culture emerging in young people. The Church is just one organisation dealing with the rate of change in our culture. Perhaps like some other organisations we have been caught out ‘selling’ the same products in a marketplace that wants change. If young people update their phone every two years, is it unreasonable to think that they expect some change in their church experience every two years? If the fashion and music scene changes every six months is it unreasonable to think that young people might expect the look and feel of their church experience to change every six months?

I don’t think anybody ever thought that the disposable razor theory would ever apply to the Church, is it possible that this is what we are now seeing in youth and young adult ministries? Is it possible that young people are so used to the rate of change that they expect change all around them? So what should we do about this in our churches and ministries? If we look at Apple, they win the customer by changing the product. We can’t change the Gospel, but that is not the ‘product’ that we are selling. We are selling programs and activities in order to win people to Christ.

In our ministries, perhaps we should think about the packaging of our message and line up some ‘disposable razors’. Here are a few examples:

A short course on a topic that is the hottest issue within the community
A few camp options within the year from overnighters to week long camps.
Opportunities to visit other churches for guest speakers or worship nights
Change the theme every school term
Have two to three options for high schoolers rather than one youth group for Year 7-12.

Yes this is harder for the youth and young adult ministry but can we really bury our head in the sand and keep everything static? If we don’t make our programs the disposable razors the risk is that Jesus becomes the disposable razor and young people move onto another spirituality. We can keep doing what we have always been doing or we can decide to work with young people as they are developing.

My hope is that together we can improve our ministry to youth and young adult to see more ‘customers’ being won to Christ. If Apple are able to keep winning loyal customers then surely we need to as well, perhaps we need to be a bit more thoughtful in how we can win loyal followers of Christ.

Please leave a comment

Mark McDonald, mrmarkmcdonald, markoffaith, MarkofFaith, Mark of Faith, markoffaith.net

3 website options for your ministry

August 31, 2012September 3, 20121 Comment

It is so important that your ministry has an online presence if your are serious about connecting with people. Not only does it help you connect with the people in your ministry but it also helps you reach new people. Some researchers, such as Richard Riesling, say that people check out at least 10 churches online before they even step foot inside a church. What does your online presence say about you and your ministry?

It is still possible to spend over $20,000 on a church website, but who has that kind of money? The most important part of your online presence is that it is online and up to date. Nobody trusts a website that is advertising Easter Services just before Christmas. Whilst your online presence doesn’t have to look impressive, it is important that it has all the information that people need. I have seen some great looking websites that have almost no value as you can’t find their location or service times. But I would warn you that the graphic style can be so bad that people choose another church over yours so be careful.

So here are three options for the website in your ministry if you have a really low budget:

Update your current website – whilst many church websites are average at best, at least they have one to work with; it just needs updating. There are some good quality templates online for only $50-100. A new template and up to date information might be all you need to improve your online presence. If you are a ministry within your church, such as the youth ministry, then make sure people can find your ministry page from the Church website home page. People should be able to get to the information they need in under 5 click. If you want advice on a layout for multi-department websites then look at a University or School website for ideas.
Start a WordPress Blog – many organisations and churches are using WordPress blogs as their website. It allows you to begin for free or buy a domain name within WordPress for only $20. The advantage of this style is that you can have a website directly for your ministry. Each ministry can have a fresh online presence they can control without being buried 10 levels down on an out of date Church website. If you want to see a church using a WordPress blog for their website check out www.libertychurchnyc.com Please note that there are other blog websites available, such as eBlogger, which offer free blog style websites. Here is how to set up a blog style website for free:
1. You will need to register your blog/website name when you sign up so think of this before you start.
2. Go to www.wordpress.com and find the section “sign up free”.
3. Follow the process to register your blog. You will get a free web address as blogname.wordpress.com or for a small fee you can buy blogname.com (which is a much better offer and WordPress still host your blog for free).
4. You will need to pick a theme, which is the design and layout of your page. My suggestion is to use the “Twenty Twelve” theme as this is designed for websites using the WordPress format.
5. Start adding pages to your blog as these pages act as sections to your website. Perhaps you need “Service info”, “events” and a really good “about” page.
6. Remember that a blog posts are listed in the order that you post, which will help you display up to date information. The downside is that if you post four or five events at once the most recent post will appear first.
7. Have fun connecting with people.
Facebook Page – almost everyone is on Facebook and perhaps your ministry needs the social networking that Facebook provides as your online presence. The other positive about Facebook is that it is free to use and everybody knows how to interact with the format. Instead of it being about your profile, go to the effort of creating a proper Facebook Page for your ministry. Facebook Pages give you the ability to create events which will help you get RSVP’s and attendance. Another positive is that people in your ministry can easily share events and information about your ministry with their friends. If your set it up correctly you will have a web address that you can use in promotional material such as http://www.facebook.com/yourministrynamehere

Most of us don’t have much money to spend on fancy websites so remember that the most important thing is that you have an online presence. If you start a website after reading this please leave a link in the comment section below so all my readers can see how it is done.

markoffaith.net markoffaith, MarkofFaith, mark of faith, Mark of Faith, mrmarkmcdonald, Mark McDonald

Creating a Big impression at Church

July 10, 2012July 10, 20121 Comment

There are occasions in every Church calendar when the leadership team want to create a big impression. Perhaps it is an outreach event, a new members night, Back to Church Sunday or the first night of an Alpha Course. Whilst we can’t create a big impression all the time, there should be one or two events every year that really create the big impression to visitors. Whilst we all look for shortcuts to creating a big impression, the reality is that a big effort creates a big impression. In a world where everyone is bombarded with excellence, people are still impressed when an organisation makes an effort to impress.

For example this week I have been taking my boys along to our local church holiday program. As we walked to the church on day one, I was expecting the boys to have a good day with other kids from the area. When I arrived at the church the entire foyer was decorated with a jungle theme including hand made vines hanging off the rafters. There was a welcome team that opened the front door for us and showed us how to register. By the time I had dropped my boys off, they were so impressed by the foyer that they were expecting a great day. The foyer experience had created a big impression on me and my boys.

Michael Hyatt suggests that the “Wow Factor” is created when an organisation goes beyond our expectations. In other words to create a big impression an organisation has to go beyond the effort that people are expecting. But there are some guideline to remember when creating a big impression so that you don’t burn out your team:

Cut back – it might seem odd to suggest that you cut back on events in order to create a big impression at Church but you can’t do everything. Your team will have to decide on what they will stop doing in order to create the time and space needed to put in the big effort required to create the big impression. Perhaps instead of doing 10 events that require a lot of effort you could scale back to three or four big impression events. Some churches have cut back from holiday programs every term so they can put the effort into one big annual holiday program.
Beg and Borrow – no ministry has the budget to do everything they want to do, so think about low cost ways to create the big impression. One ministry drove a car into the church foyer to create the wow factor for a father’s day event, another church put a king size bed on stage for an event on Marriage (both items were owned by church members). Think about items that you can get or borrow for free and then use them in interesting ways.
Centre piece – if you do have the budget for decoration, then spend it on the focal point in the room. When people are sitting or standing for the longest part of your event where will they be looking? This focal point is where you can spend your money and biggest effort. You don’t want to spend money on the foyer if the participants will spend 3 or 4 hours looking at a blank wall behind the guest speaker. However if you are after positive first impressions then what will a guest see first?
Recruit Volunteers – having lots of volunteers will make it much easier to set up and pack down. We often forget how much effort it takes to pack up the event at the end, so organise the pack up team before you start. The more volunteers you have to make things before the event the less you will have to spend on items made by someone else. For example Conference bags are a standard item that create a big impression if it is full of useful items rather than just a pen and blank paper yet it can take hours for volunteers to stuff 100 conference bags carefully.
Invite people to the event – if you are going to spend time and money on creating a big impression then you want people not just to see it but experience it. You need to spend as much effort on inviting people to the event as setting up for the event.

It is often said that “Excellence honours God and inspires others” and yet this takes a lot of effort. If you want to create a big impression it is going to take a big effort. After reading this post perhaps you need to lead your team to think through the rest of annual calendar to choose one or two events that are going to get the big effort and which events won’t require as much effort.

You might also like to read about creating excellence at Church

Also please leave a comment about how you have created a big impression at your Church.

markoffaith, Mark of Faith, mark of faith

The Excellence debate

April 10, 20127 Comments

“Excellence honours God and inspires others”

Have you ever gone into a church for the first time and seen something that made you think “that is a little out of place”? Have you ever been to a church or attended a ministry event and thought things looked a little sloppy and could have been done better? Or on the flip side have you ever been to a ministry event that ran like clockwork and you were impressed? It seems that we all have our own interior benchmark of what we think is “done well” and what we think is “done poorly”.

Yet I often hear from people that the Church needs to pick up its game in terms of the standard of events, presentation and hospitality. I have also heard from others who say the Church should never be too slick or fancy. Whilst some churches are pursuing excellence others are deliberately keeping things low budget so as not to look perfect. So my two questions for today are:

What level of excellence is appropriate in the Church?
Should the Church worry about excellence?

Let me start by giving you a few examples that I have witnessed from the best and worst of excellence in church and ministry:

Worst

I attended a young adult camp where the worship band left plates on stage from breakfast.
One church had posters for a youth group that looked like they were designed by a kindergarten class.
One church foyer had three different style of notice boards, posters about Christmas at Easter time and a pile of lost property that just looked messy.
A guest speaker had to rearrange the stage before he could start speaking because the musicians just walked off without clearing the stage.

Best

My church has a well-designed event template for all their posters so they look professional even though the ministry leader drops their event details into the template.
A ministry team that turned the cheap hall they hired for a youth camp into an inspiring place for worship.
A café night at church that had tasty food with enough for everyone to have extra.
A celebration night at church that had proper wine glasses and plates for the food (no plastic forks!)

These are just a few things that I have noticed. But what have you noticed? I invite you to leave a comment at the end about what you judge to be the best and the worst of excellence in church and ministry.

What is the right level of excellence in the Church? The right level of excellence is doing the best you can with the best you’ve got. Excellence doesn’t mean spending more money; you have to have excellent budgeting skills too. Excellence is about enabling people to encounter and experience God without any barriers in the way. If the goal is excellence then we have failed. Excellence is a tool to help you bring people into an encounter with God.
Should the Church worry about excellence? The Church should do the best it can to make it easier for people to encounter God, make disciples and join in the Mission. The Church should be a place that inspires people to see the grandness and greatness of God. People in ministry should offer the same level of service, or higher, that a person would get if they visited a hotel, restaurant, shopping centre or cultural museum. I think the problem is that we either don’t inspire people or we go back to “traditional” methods that Christians used last century to inspire people but they don’t inspire 21^st century people.

Recently I was listening to a podcast with Louie and Shelley Giglio about the level of excellence at their Church, Passion City Church. They shared their thoughts about the right level of excellence in two ways:

When they get ready for Church or events their team doesn’t pray for excellence, they pray that the Holy Spirit might touch people. For Passion City Church, it is not about achieving excellence but removing barriers.
When the Church is excellent in presenting its craft, services/ministry, then it encourages people to go into their jobs and be excellent at their craft. Louie said “the best evangelism happens when your lifestyle is so inspiring that people ask you what makes you tick.”

So don’t kill yourself or stress your team or break the budget to achieve excellence in your ministry. But please don’t be sloppy, unprepared or messy as it doesn’t do anyone any favours. Could you please leave a comment about what you have seen as the best and worst of excellence in church and ministry?

Print Marketing … on a budget

December 19, 20112 Comments

It is that time of the year when our letter box is full of church marketing. A number of churches in my area have dropped off invitations to the Christmas events. Some churches have invitations to carols, nativity plays and of course their Christmas services. Some of the invitations are glossy professionally printed cards whilst others make some amateur home printing mistakes. In this post I want to share with you some tips I have learnt about doing print marketing on a budget; meaning you are printing hundred of postcards in your office.

One thing I learnt about professional printing is that they can do anything you want … for a price. Perhaps you don’t have the money to send the flyer to a printer so you are going to print your flyers “in house”. Maybe you have a photocopier, maybe a colour printer or maybe you have a black and white printer. What ever your situation you are limited by the printer you have and the time to cut up hundreds of items. But there are some tricks to get around your printer to disguise that they were printed in your office. I suggest two types of print marketing, posters and postcards.

The Postcard – this will be your base print marketing because you can put it in the hand or mailbox of everyone you want to invite. The easiest way to do this “in house” is to print four cards to an A4 page. This is just a matter of repeating the same card four times on the one page. Here are a few tips –

Never do a border – if you print a border on your card then you will spend hours trying to get your margins the same on all four images once they are printed. If you remove the border then it is easier to cut up the four cards without it looking off center.
More detail than a poster – on a postcard you should include more details so that the person will keep the card. If it is too basic they will throw it in the bin and jump on your website. You want them to keep the card.

The Poster – you want to saturate your church with posters of your events and an A4 poster can be affective. If there is room it can be more striking to place four posters together on a notice board. The poster should do two things:

Draw in someone’s attention – the poster should turn heads not blend in. Find an image that will draw people in.
Send them to a website for more details – some posters can be too overloaded with information. A poster shouldn’t be a larger version of your postcard. Never include the price on the poster as you want them to check out all the details on your Facebook page or website.

Here are just a few other thoughts that will help you when you have no budget and have to print in-house:

White edge – most of us printer that can’t print to the edge; it leaves a white border of 3-4mm. So design your poster or postcard with this in mind. You can design your card to look like a Polaroid as this has a white border. You can also fade the edge of your image to white. Black backgrounds don’t look good with a white border so avoid these if you don’t want to cut each item.
Graphics – you can use a lot of good images off Microsoft clipart, type in backgrounds to see a range of images to build your poster on. Go for their new items such as vectors or photos.
Fonts – a good font can make all the difference. You can download hundreds of fonts for free from many websites. Try about 20-30 fonts before you print, one font might take it from an average design to a great design.
News print – some churches have used the news print style to cover up for the basic printer they are using. The retro, rustic or newsprint styles all look better on cheaper printers than trying to do the high gloss corporate look in the office.
Work with the imperfections of your printer. If your printed always misses a spot then don’t make that spot where the key information is.

Whilst it might be a little late for Christmas, you have some tips to improve your news years marketing. When you are launching your programs for 2012 you have some design tips to help you.

Perhaps you have made some mistakes in the past and have learnt some trick that others would love to learn from. Please consider sharing them with us by leaving a comment