• 25 Questions for people who want to make churches grow

    1. Do you have a decent church website?
    2. Is it up to date?
    3. Is it responsive – ie does it work on mobile phones?
    4. Does your own online profile feature your ideas and hopes and dreams other than a desire for people to turn up to church?
    5. Do you know what you are doing with twitter and facebook?
    6. Who could you learn more about social media from?
    7. Do you have a compelling reason why people should come to your church other than where it is or what denomination it belongs to?
    8. Can everyone in the church tell you in one sentence what that compelling reason is?
    9. What is your beginners’ course like?
    10. What comes after the beginners’ course?
    11. Do people like the preaching?
    12. Do people enjoy the music?
    13. Have you dealt with conflicts from the past?
    14. Are the people friendly?
    15. Do you have any new groups starting soon?
    16. Do you talk about making the world a better place?
    17. How will people experience joy if they come to your congregation?
    18. If someone from your past turned up unexpectedly at worship how would it make you feel?
    19. How do you identify newcomers and what do you offer them?
    20. What problems will arise if you do grow and how will you deal with them?
    21. Do claims that you welcome everyone stop you working at welcoming those who traditionally find it hard to find a home in church?
    22. Do you use language that is inclusive of everyone?
    23. How do you know?
    24. Is there any identifiable group of people that you can’t explicitly say are welcome because of how an individual or group in the congregation will react?
    25. Do you want to grow or not?

3 responses to “So out of touch”

  1. Tim Avatar

    The *other* half of that `presbyterian model’ quote is truly barf-worthy especially given several unpleasant incidents hitting the press in the past 6 months.

    I think `Whenever there are progressive values around’ might be happening at the level of society as a whole, not just in churches, though.

  2. kelvin Avatar

    I’d rather like to think that it would be obvious to people in the various churches that no one system owns a “reflection, consultation, debate and discernment” model. Such ways of working can be found in different churches. Failures to work in such ways call also be found in different church systems.

  3. Rosemary Hannah Avatar
    Rosemary Hannah

    We are hijacked by people who scream and scream until they are sick (they can, you know) and lack the guts to say ‘Here is the bucket’. The attempt to ‘keep all the balls in the holes’ shows a total lack of any grasp of what leadership means.

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