All right, blogland, I need some help.�
Many of you know, I am from a small Lutheran church.� We're a friendly, but mostly older congregation.� We only have about 6 families with younger children.� The parents of the majority of our youth kids attend other churches.� Our youth group has about 8 teens, and in the way of children younger than that, we have maybe ten.� Very small and I fear we are in a rut.
My thoughts are that we need to do different things in order to reach the unchurched.� I'm just not certain of what these things are.� We currently offer one small group on Lutheranism, youth group, VBS, senior choir, praise band and Sunday school for all ages.� Our members are faithful, but the same people are the ones who volunteer for everything over and over again, thus often causing burnout.
I want to shake things up.� I want to be a church where things are happening.� I've been praying about but now I need ideas for ministry on a small scale.� I'm already thinking drama ministry, but what else can we do out of the ordinary?� Then there is regular ordinary and special occasions like Christmas, Easter, All Saints Sunday, etc.� We do a blessing of the animals once a year on the front lawn which always piques people's interest, so stuff like that.
What has worked in your church?� What do you do that you think is totally cool and spreads the Gospel and helps churches to grow.� Give me everything you've got.� This is a total brainstorming session.
GO!
Tuesday, August 4, 2009
How to Grow
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I think that you need to attract some younger folks - so maybe an Octoberfest type event or Fall Festival would be good. Some people are really against going trick or treating with their kids these days, and that would give them an alternative - hopefully also bringing some of them in to check out your church on that Sunday too.
ReplyDeleteWe did that in the Spring and it brought in several families.
What else... hmmmm... we focus a lot on small groups - (I emailed you info on ours by the way) - with those we try to guide the leaders against meeting on Sundays. Our thought there is that we don't want people to get all of their "religion" on Sundays... so we do ours on Thursday nights. It is great to get 5 or so couples together - go through a study that we choose - and have dinner together. We also have a babysitter come to our house - but we have lots of younger couples in our group. There are other groups with older children that don't offer that. The key is to publicize the groups and the different studies - and the studies should be relevant to the varying types of people in your group.
Other than that - we've done a couple of things where we go hand out water at ball fields on Saturday mornings (we attach either a label or a card that has our church info on it)... we've also done it at Wal-Mart.
I hope this helps!!
Kim...I sent you an email on this...too long to leave in the comments section :)...xoxo...Jil
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