Andrew Bowles wrote:
Last year our church tried some leaflets, but with little response. Apparently that sort of advertising needs to be done as part of a consistent campaign, up to seven times, before it has a real impact.
As part of my traineeship at St Jude's, I was for a while involved with the Lygon St chaplaincy. I visited the shops along the street, introducing myself as from the church, and explaining how we wanted to be part of the community, keen to invite them to join what we were doing and asking if we could pray for them. There were a range of different responses (ranging from really enthusiastic and approving that the church didn't just want to be inward-looking but engage with the community, to cynical and disinterested, or just confused responses - one shop attendant said she'd need to ask Head Office to approve any prayer points!). Over a year or so, I visited various shops a couple of times (introducing myself, and then taking around Easter/Christmas service invitations) with several months apart. In a surprising number of shops, people remembered me (and it was helpful if I'd written their names down and what we'd spoken about, so that I could continue the conversation!) and I noticed a marked increase in warmth on the second or third time that I visited. One woman whose face went hard and totally disinterested the first time I visited, was positively welcoming and very interested the third time I saw her (especially since I'd remembered details about her Christmas party and could ask about it).
The points I'm trying to raise are:
* Personal contact and especially a smiley, warm, engaging face go a very very long way!
* Being part of a community over a period of time is important - people need to know you're not going to just come once and then run away (hopefully it can be the community rather than an individual that continues to be involved).
I think Nick Pollard's book, 'Beyond the Fringe', is an excellent book for thinking about creatively and positively engaging with your community (but the ideas require a big commitment of time and energy - more so than putting up signs!).
On the topic of signs, though, I've heard of a few of people who've come to St Jude's because of our signs - and I don't think our church is particularly well signed at all!
Websites are probably almost vital if you're ministering to an internet-savvy target group, like workers or students. When I was church hunting, my method was to check out that city's Christian Union website and see if they had a list of churches. They did, and I looked at their websites to see which ones were worth visiting. Churches that didn't have a website didn't even get a look in. Church websites are difficult to get off the ground, though. :)
