What is in Kelvin's Head?

12 tips to get people to come to Christmas Services

17/12/2015

Earlier this year, I won a competition. Someone had published a new plugin for WordPress that allows you to fairly easily publish google maps with your own points of interest on them. As a way of promoting the plugin, the competition was to offer a year’s license to the top 20 people who came up with an idea for using it. My idea (which wasn’t really rocket science) was to use it to build a map of where Christmas services are taking place. I won one of the licenses with this suggestion.

I remembered that this week and decided that I’d better make good on my competition entry. I downloaded the plugin and started to build a map of the services that are taking place in this diocese on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day this year according to the data that I could find available on those churches’ websites. You can find the map at the bottom of this post.

Having taken a look around the websites of the churches in the diocese, there’s a few things that I think are worth saying.

The truth is, there are hundreds of people who are going to be using the internet (often through their mobile phones) this week to try to find Christmas services to attend. This is the time of year when people are most likely to just want to attend church. People will just turn up. If they like what they discover, they are likely to turn up again next year. Or even next Sunday. It is the primary time when people will be predisposed to turn up to church. If we do care about mission, then this week matters hugely and as always, the three big mission themes that so often get ignored (worship, web and welcome) are absolutely key.

Here’s a few tips for getting people to come to church at Christmas using the internet

1 – Put your Christmas Services on your website.
2 – Put the details on the front page either with an obvious link that says “Christmas Services” or right there, right on the front page itself.
3 – Put the address of the church, with a full postcode right on there too so that people can use sat-nav technology to find the church.
4 – As our Lord said, “Don’t hide your light under a ~~bushel~~ pdf”. If you put the details in a pdf and upload that to your website, far fewer people will see them. Similarly with making pretty graphics of your Christmas services. The reason this doesn’t work without plain text is that search engines like google can’t see your Christmas services and lots of other people will never find the details either. Oh, and flash based websites are so last century. Don’t. Just don’t.
5 – This year at Christmas take some nice, good quality photographs of the church when it is decorated so that you can use the pics online next year, if not this year. Try to include pics with people in them. You want either close ups of the crib/decorations or pics of people with Christmas Trees in the background – that kind of thing. You don’t want pics of an empty church.
6 – If you use social media then link to it from your website and link to your website from your social media stream.
7 – Use social media. Just use it.
8 – Remember that people out there make their judgements on what they see online and not what you know to be happening. You can have the best all singing, all dancing children’s service in Christendom but if there’s nothing about it online people will say, “What a shame that the church doesn’t do things for children at Christmas, where shall we go instead?”
9 – If your website doesn’t work on a mobile then start to plan for next Christmas by upgrading it as soon as possible. More people search for information using mobile devices than desktop computers now and it is only going to rise. Easiest way of doing this is a website built with a content management system like WordPress running a responsive theme. Responsive means that the theme adjusts to the size of the screen that people are looking at it on. It matters very much indeed now as Google will rank pages lower if they are not responsive.
10 – Make a new year’s resolution to learn something about Search Engine Optimisation. Sounds technical but isn’t really – just means that you have a website organised so that those search engines can point more people towards your website when they search for things. Again, WordPress is a good answer along with an SEO plugin such as the one published by Yoast.
11 – Remember that people search using their own words and not your words. Don’t expect people looking for “Christmas Services” to click on “diary”, “lectionary”, “events” or “calendar”. Again, don’t hide your information but bring it right out into the open.
12 – Remember that your website is primarily for people who don’t come to church and that they are actually already reading it. Yes, really.

Now, on to the map.

It is colour coded. Those churches in red had their Christmas Services easily available on or from their front page. Those with purple markers had the information available but it took some work to find it. Those in blue had websites with no Christmas info that I could find. Those in yellow were churches where I couldn’t find a website at all.

There will be gaps and mistakes – I did this fairly quickly last night. I’d be very happy to include information that is missing if anyone wants to drop me a line. If you do want an update, tell me gently – and remember just because information doesn’t appear here it doesn’t mean that nothing is happening. It just means that I couldn’t find the information – and that’s the point. If I couldn’t find it easily then the chances are lots of people won’t find it.

[google_maps id=”14760″]

My very grateful thanks to Chris Lema for running the original competition that brought me the Maps Builder Pro plugin and to Matt Cromwell for releasing it. It is fantastic. I wish there were a lifetime access deal for purchasing it as I happen to hate annual subscription licenses but apart from that, this is one sophisticated mapping plugin that is very easy to use and there’s a ton of things I can think of doing with it.

UPDATE – 18 December 2015
There have been a couple of updates since the map was originally published.
All Saints’, Bearsden get a Red Pin of Righteousness – I had been looking at a version of their previous website though how I accessed it, I’ve now no idea.
St Oswald’s, Maybole get a Red Pin of Righteousness – They’ve moved the details of their Christmas services out of a jpg file and into plain text.
St Bride’s, Hyndland get a Red Pin of Righteousness – They’ve now got their Christmas Services right on the front page.
St Augustine’s, Dumbarton move up to a Purple Pin of Plausability – their details are there but it still takes a bit of work to find them.

chris lema, Christmas, christmas services, church websites, Diocese of Glasgow and Galloway, tips

7 responses to “Whither the Kirk?”

Pausing Place

25/08/2010

I missed last night’s programme, but I thought your comments were interesting.

In a sense, perhaps it’s unsurprising if the SEC is inwardly more positive about itself than the CofS. My take is that in the recent past, at least, the SEC started from a lower common denominator, not being the “local” church in the same way as the Kirk, and so it doesn’t have to contend with others saying of it “look how the mighty have fallen” in quite the same way.

As to the health of the Kirk (and the SEC for that matter), I think we need to reflect on our self-perception and to consider carefully the points and places in which a dying church (congregation or denomination) should be allowed to die gracefully, and the ways in which we might see new life emerge from the rubble.

As a young(ish!), relatively new Christian I have seen examples of (both urban and rural) SEC and Kirk congregations where there are few signs of new growth, little to draw in younger (under 50 year olds, to pick a random-ish number) new folk, and much to sustain negative preconceptions of church as boring, irrelevant and so forth.

We as a faith community need to get much better at stepping up to the mark in our creativity and engagement with our society. The sad truth is that most young adults do not know and have not heard about Jesus Christ, and unless we engage with them in ways culturally relevant to them, and which do not presuppose previous knowledge (too often taken for granted) they never will.

It troubles me, but I do think it’s true to say that in the SEC and in the Kirk we have a church sustained by the traditions and cultural reference points taught to a previous generation. Culture has shifted radically, with the result that the same will not be able to be said in 20 years time.

Our challenge is clear. Whether the Kirk and the SEC can step up to the mark to address what it means to live out the Great Commission in the 21st century is less so.

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Cal

25/08/2010

I didn’t really understand who this programme was aimed at, or even what its aim was.

Yes, numbers have fallen, but perhaps the small number of people who remain are there because they actually want to be, not because it’s the done thing on a Sunday morning.

And personally, I rather like the idea of a church “sustained by traditions”. Clearly the church has to be relevant to modern society, but in abandoning the traditions of worship then you lose the centre of why the church exists in the first place.

There was something very Presbyterian about the programme with its “we’re doomed” mentality. I find the SEC generally more positive in outlook.

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John

25/08/2010

The only book the presenter seemed to have used in his research was ‘The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800-2000’ By Callum G Brown – indeed Callum Brown was one of the speakers. The thesis of this well argued sociological study is that “quite suddenly in 1963 something very profound ruptured the character of the nation and its people sending organised Christianity on a downward spiral to the margins of social significanceâ€. That something he identifies as new media, new gender roles and a moral revolution which has dramatically ended peopleâ€™s conception that they lived Christian lives.â€ It could be said to have happened as â€œsex beganâ€ between the end of the Chatterly ban and the Beatles first LP as the poet Philip Larkin so famously put it.”
To balance this statistical decline the programme flagged up some of the “church without walls ” iniatives in a lame sort of way. All in all a most unsatisfactory programme that only told half the story.

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Kenny

25/08/2010

Good crit Kelvin. My reflection at the end of the programme was, “Lord, we visited this stuff over 30 years ago, and have come out of it stronger and better Church in the SEC.” Hopefully, we stopped longing for ‘the good old days’ a long time ago!

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MartinRitchie

26/08/2010

I thinking “Pausing Place” makes a good point about needing to creatively engage with society. From my own experience of working with a CofS congregation, this creative engagement is a weak spot for many.

As a counterpoint to the programme, interesting to note in the latest “Life and Work” a very positive article about a growing CofS congregation in Stornoway – and I mean really growing! So not all doom and gloom, and I’m sure there are many more examples of bright spots, just as there are in the SEC!

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Graham Vahey

28/08/2010

If the C of S disappeared completely we would be at a loss. During the dark and bleak years of Thatcher’s reign she refused to visit Scotland for 5 years. When she did she expressed shock that we had Royal Regalia and ordered it to be removed immediately for safe-keeping to England. Her ‘Sermon on the Mound’ is now historical for its condescension to the Scots. She was none too pleased to be handed two reports on poverty in Scotland by the powerful Church and Nation Committee. Indeed, it was to this Committee that the population turned to for a moral lead during Thatcherism. When James VI (‘Jamie the Saxt’) became James I in England, the population turned to senior Scottish earls for a moral lead. Unfortunately, the Piskie Church does not give a moral lead in Scotland, apart from the work of the Scottish Constitutional Convention in the recent past. The RC Church does pronounce on moral issues. Could it not be conceivable that all the major Churches could unite in a Committee to pronounce for Scotland on moral issues as the Church & Nation Committee once did?

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Aldous N. Gaiters

01/09/2010

Speaking as a Nonjuror myself I am sure the SEC has a right to a moral voice in Scotland. Taking the US daughter church of the SEC as a model you could see where the fissures would appear. There is room for a modern liberal Christian voice, but even I an old Liberal myself, would have to fear that such a voice might appeal to only a select few.

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