100 Ways to Get Your Church Noticed

100 WAYS TO GET YOUR CHURCH NOTICED

Also by Neil Pugmire

Published by Kingsway:

50 Seasonal Sketches (2002)

100 Ways to Get Your Church Noticed (2006 edition)

Published by the Bible Reading Fellowship:

The Adventures of the J Team, with Sue Hodge (2003)

Launchpad, with Mark Rodel (2004)

100 WAYS TO GET YOUR CHURCH NOTICED

Neil Pugmire

Church House Publishing

Church House

Great Smith Street

London SW1P 3AZ

ISBN 978-0-7151-4467-1

Published 2014 by Church House Publishing

Copyright © Neil Pugmire 2014

Illustrations by James Holt

Photographs by Neil Pugmire and Peter Langdown

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, or stored or transmitted by any means or in any form, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system without written permission which should be sought from the Copyright Administrator, Church House Publishing, Church House, Great Smith Street, London SW1P 3AZ.

Email: [email protected]

The opinions expressed in this book are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of the General Synod or The Archbishops’ Council of the Church of England.

Typeset by Regent Typesetting

Printed and bound in England by CPI Group (UK) Ltd

Contents

Foreword

Introduction

Strategy

1. Set up a communications team to co-ordinate publicity

2. Create a communication strategy – and keep it updated

3. Think about the types of communication your church may need to stop doing to release people’s time and energy in other areas

Identity

4. Decide the kind of identity that your church wants to have and create a suitable logo

5. Use your new logo on all church literature

6. Create a joint identity/logo with nearby churches of all denominations to reflect your unity

Creating images

7. Recruit someone who can take photos and/or record video for your church

Building (external)

8. Create a more modern look to the outside of your church building

9. Lobby your local authority to create a sign identifying your church from the nearest main roads

10. Keep your church building open as often as possible during the day

11. Create a ‘welcome/the church is open’ sign and place it outside where passers-by will see it

12. Decorate the outside of church, not just the inside

13. Drape a banner from the spire/roof to advertise special events

Building (internal)

14. Redesign your church’s entrance or foyer to make it look more attractive

15. Ensure there is a rota of people who can be discreetly available in church if anyone needs information or prayer

16. Create a coffee shop or bookshop within your church

17. Think about what your seating area communicates to visitors

18. Create the right ambience inside the church for prayer and reflection

19. Create a prayer guide to help visitors engage spiritually

Locations

20. Think about different places for your congregation to meet

21. Plant a new congregation in a part of your neighbourhood that may not be served by a church

22. Think about creating church plants or cell groups that are not bound by where people live, but by shared interests

23. Hold a regular or occasional open-air service

24. Liaise with your local pub landlord to hold an informal service there

External noticeboards

25. Relocate your noticeboards so they can be seen more easily

26. Revamp your noticeboards to suggest a more vibrant congregation

27. Include a glass-fronted section to display posters

28. Include up-to-date contact details for ministers and others

29. Put your website address or QR code on your noticeboard

30. Use an electronic moving display board or a video board

Community needs

31. Survey the physical and social needs of your community – and use your building to meet some of them

32. Liaise with your local authority to discover which local needs are not being met, and work with them to try to meet them

33. Meet spiritual needs outside Sunday services

34. Create an after-school or holiday club for children

35. Invite professionals who work in your community to meet congregation members and ask how local Christians can help them in their jobs

Welcome pack

36. Produce a ‘welcome pack’ with essential information about church activities

37. Leave welcome packs in public places and give them to those who enquire about baptisms, weddings and funerals

38. Ask congregation members to give packs to new neighbours as they move into their street

39. Include a DVD showing church activities within your welcome pack

Internal displays

40. Reorganise the location of internal display boards

41. Reorganise the content of your display boards to help people access information more easily

42. Create a display of photos or a video showing people involved in church activities

43. Create a display of children’s work or a children’s corner, to show that the church is genuinely family-friendly

Church services

44. Recruit a ‘welcome team’ of people who can talk to newcomers or visitors as they arrive

45. Use PowerPoint technology to ensure a scrolling display of information and photos about church activities or forthcoming events

46. Connect a video camera to your audio-visual technology so people at the back of church can see what’s happening at the front

47. Make greater use of the symbolic or the visual during sermons

48. Foster a word-of-mouth reputation for laying on ‘special event’ services

Weekly leaflets

49. Revamp your weekly leaflet, using more graphics, bigger headings and more colour

Leaflets/posters

50. Produce well-designed posters with attention-grabbing images, fewer words and more colour

51. Produce leaflets publicising your church’s forthcoming events or activities

52. Create specifically youth-friendly flyers for youth events

53. Create a ‘term card’ showing the themes and styles of church services and activities for the next few months

Parish magazine

54. Ask your congregation to subsidise your church publication as a form of outreach

55. Relaunch your parish magazine as a community newsletter and invite non-churchgoers to write for it

56. Create a single ecumenical publication

57. Encourage your editor to edit

58. Include stories of faith from your congregation in your publication

59. Use good-quality photographs

60. Revamp your design

61. Improve the production of your publication

62. Create a more effective distribution system to ensure your publication reaches as many people as possible

Community service

63. Offer to clean up an untidy public space in your local community, in liaison with your local authority

64. Give practical help to disadvantaged families for free

65. ‘Bless your community’ by using church funds to pay for small but significant things that will brighten up people’s days

66. Throw regular free events as gifts to your community

Media liaison

67. Recruit someone to promote ‘good news’ about your church

68. Learn how to write press releases that will be used

69. Learn how to give good interviews

70. Take digital photos of events and email them to media outlets

71. Speak out on controversial issues, especially if they are on the news agenda

72. Put a positive spin on bad news

73. Comment on online newspaper stories or contribute to radio phone-ins about Christianity

Website

74. Create a church website or revamp your existing one

75. Make your website interactive

76. Allow people to subscribe to a regular e-newsletter telling them what’s happening at your church

77. Put spiritual resources on your website so web users can engage with their spirituality at home

78. Offer to pray for people’s individual needs

79. Look at live streaming of video footage, audio files or podcasts of services on your website

Mobile phones

80. Update people via text message

81. Develop an app for mobile phones

Social media

82. Learn to use social media to promote your church

83. Create a Facebook page or group for your church

84. Use Facebook adverts

85. Create a Twitter feed for your church

86. Create a YouTube channel for your church

87. Investigate other types of social media

Sport

88. Create a church sports team to play in a local league

89. Hold a sports day for local families

Tourism

90. Make sure your church is represented in tourist information centres

91. Make information about the history of your church available inside the building

92. Hold regular open days so people can discover more about the history or ecology of your church

93. Promote your redeveloped church building as an ideal conference or retreat location

Miscellaneous

94. Keep a database of those on the ‘fringe’ with whom your church has had contact

95. Deliver leaflets to people’s homes offering to pray for their needs

96. Apply for a stand at your local psychic fair to promote Christianity

97. Take out a pitch at your local car boot sale, wedding fair or secular village fete to publicise church activities

98. Give out invitations welcoming people to come back to church

99. Go carol singing around your community

100. Advertise major events on billboards or bus shelters, or via magazines, local newspapers and local radio

Foreword

God is incorrigibly communicative. Communication, for God, is a joy – a compulsion, even. It is impossible for us to imagine a God that shuts himself away in the heavens and decides it’s just too much hassle to reach out and share his love and his delight in the world.  

That truth runs throughout the Bible and is at the heart of our Christian delight in sharing the good news. For Christians, communication isn’t an add-on to our faith or our role in church. It gets to the very heart of who we are and what we believe. And just as God chooses to communicate through human flesh in Jesus Christ, so how we communicate is at least as important as what we say. Through the tone and clarity of the written word and in social media, on our noticeboards and our websites, we engage in outreach and mission. Sometimes these means of communication are even more powerful than what we speak with our mouths.

This new edition of Neil Pugmire’s book brings us right up to date with the seemingly ever-growing opportunities for communicating the gospel. From huge experience in journalism and Christian communication, Neil shares with us what we need to consider as we plan what to say and how to say it. The book is brimming with practical pointers and insights that are shared with the simple aim of helping the church communicate well.

Centuries ago, in the book of Deuteronomy, God told us to use every tool that we have at our disposal to communicate his love – keeping his words in our hearts, reciting them to our children, binding them to our arms and on our foreheads, pinning them to our gateposts. Though the means have changed, the aspiration is the same. Everything we do, everything we communicate, must continually call people into the love we have for our God, and the love our God has for us in Jesus Christ.

The Rt Revd Christopher Foster

Anglican Bishop of Portsmouth

Introduction

In today’s society, we can rarely do anything without something screaming for our attention, whether it’s ‘in-your-face’ TV advertising, incessant text messages, billboards plastered with designer logos or addictive social media apps. In a typical day, we will be exposed to more than 3,000 adverts – from the obvious ones in newspapers and on websites to more subtle commercial logos on supermarket plastic bags or the side of beer glasses.

Not surprisingly, many churches struggle to make their voices heard above the cacophony. Some still rely on methods they used 40 years ago to try to communicate their messages – the hand-drawn poster stuck to the church noticeboard, the photocopied parish magazine, or the verbal notice at the start of worship. Because there is so much more information for everyone to absorb these days, even regular churchgoers may miss the casual reference to an event or an opportunity.

Not only are some of the methods we use liable to be swamped by a thousand and one other things, but they may also be the wrong types of communication for the kind of people we want to attract. One survey has suggested that only around 15 per cent of the UK population are ‘readers’ – people who are comfortable digesting slabs of text in books, newspapers or committee minutes. Another 15 per cent of people are ‘non-readers’ – those who feel very uncomfortable reading anything. The vast majority, 70 per cent, are categorised as ‘browsers’. Such people flick through newspapers and magazines, stopping to read only when an eye-catching headline or photo catches their attention. They are happy to read, but will quickly get bored.

Broadly speaking, the kind of people who go to church are likely to be older, wealthier and better educated than the majority of the population. Congregations and church leaders will tend to be among the ‘readers’ within the population. The type of communication they use tends to be text-based, rather than visual. Yet for the vast majority of people, this often isn’t an attractive method of communication.

We live in a highly visual age, with umpteen digital TV channels to choose from, millions of snazzy, image-based web pages to look at, and well-designed glossy magazines in every newsagent. Give a ‘browser’ a typical piece of church literature, and it’s unlikely to grab their attention for long.

So how can we make sure our churches, activities, events and people get noticed in this busy, secular, visual world? The ideas in this book incorporate those you might understand as ‘publicity’ in the normal sense – websites, posters, parish magazines, media liaison, social media – and other ideas that have more to do with involvement with the local community or the look and feel of our church building. These also have a valuable role to play in our church’s communications strategy.

Word-of-mouth reputation is still important, even in a society where we rarely talk to our immediate neighbours. Think of how easy it is for a local school, hospital or garage to gain a good or a bad reputation, simply by friends talking about it. The same can, and does, happen to churches. Personal recommendations are also trusted more than glossy brochures – even personal recommendations from people we don’t know that are posted online.

The aim of communicating with the wider community is not just to ‘get your church noticed’. The purpose behind this activity is to draw people closer to God. Marketing your church as a vibrant, exciting community is a way of encouraging non-churchgoers to sample your activities, learn more of the gospel and develop their own faith. If you discover that your posters, leaflets and parish magazine articles are starting to glorify your church or its leaders rather than drawing people into a deeper spiritual life, you’re heading down the wrong track. One of the problems with imitating secular culture is that we can fall into the same traps of worshipping ‘celebrity’ rather than God himself.

The other difficulty that Christians may have with using marketing techniques is that it may seem dishonest. Your church may not actually be the vibrant, exciting community you would like it to be, so it may seem deceitful to be selling it in that way. If there are only a couple of families in the congregation, can we really claim it’s an ideal place for young children? We should, of course, be scrupulously honest in everything we say. But sometimes it’s more about accentuating the positive than being deliberately untruthful. There are good points about every church. Ask your fellow worshippers what they enjoy about your church, and use those responses to inform what you say.

Internal and external communication

Church communication includes two elements. Internal communication involves helping church members understand about the church’s vision and priorities, teaching them about faith, and making sure they are aware about forthcoming events. It also involves making sure members can communicate with each other and provide feedback to the leadership. Communication is not just one-way: in the best churches, church members feel that their leadership is listening and responding.

External communication involves communicating to those in the wider community about forthcoming events, how the church can help in times of need, worship services and the gospel message itself. This is, naturally, closely allied with mission and community engagement. It can involve trying to subvert misconceptions that people have about Christianity in general, or your church in particular. It can involve appropriating some of the methods used by the secular world, such as branding, training in offering a welcome, and media liaison. Equally, it can be completely counter-cultural – offering to do menial, practical tasks for people you don’t know is virtually unheard of outside Christian circles.

You may wonder why internal communication with those who already go to church is included in a book about getting your church noticed. Surely those who already come to your church know all about it? To a certain extent, they do (although there are probably some church activities they know nothing about). But the best adverts for church are actually those who go. If they know about your events well in advance, and your activities in some detail, their word-of-mouth recommendation will be well informed and passionate. If they don’t, any invitation to non-churchgoers may be more vague or even non-existent.

Basic principles

The fact that we are still reading and absorbing Jesus’ words and values 2,000 years after his earthly life suggests that he was an excellent communicator. He didn’t have his own website, colourful posters or a book deal. But he displayed some important principles about communication that we would do well to study:

1. He knew his message

We often talk today about having some kind of ‘mission statement’ – a guiding principle behind all that we do. Jesus certainly knew what he was on earth for and which messages he wanted to emphasise over and over again, both in words and actions. He wanted people to repent, to be healed and to be set free; he wanted them to understand the good news about the new kingdom; he wanted to be inclusive to those on the margins of society. Theologically, some of these concepts might have been complex, but he expressed them simply and directly, repeated them often, and used actions as often as using words. Do we do the same?

2. He knew his audience

Look at the kind of people Jesus was speaking to: first-century fishermen, farmers, tax collectors and religious zealots. He knew their backgrounds, and what would appeal to them. That’s why his parables were all about growing wheat, managing vineyards and caring for farm animals. And he also spoke in different ways to different people. He told the crowds entertaining parables, but explained the meaning behind them only to his disciples. He argued about religious hypocrisy with the Pharisees, but spoke in quite a different way to the woman caught in adultery. Do we also tailor our message to different audiences, or do we use the same methods each time?

3. He used stories and images

Jesus’ stories were easy to understand, even though he was conveying quite complex spiritual points about social justice, the afterlife or atonement. He rarely answered an abstract question with an abstract answer. He constantly used metaphors, visual aids and symbolic images. Some of his Sabbath healings are dramatic, visual examples of the nature of his new kingdom. He spoke about the ‘living water’ to the woman at the well, compared God’s love to the devotion of a father for his wayward son, and used images of broken bread and outpoured wine to describe his own death. Jesus knew these