So, you want to grow your Church? Utilizing online methods will help you reach more people in a shorter amount of time (and often at a lower amount of money, therefore helping your budget as well). Here are a few pointers to help your Church grow using online methods.
Tech Basics for Churches
Ideally, a Church should have at least the following set up:
- Church Management System
- Online streaming for their Church service (and sermon clips being posted to social media every week)
- Social media accounts (at least Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and YouTube)
- LMS (Learning Management System) for their Church (to give away free online classes/courses to their community)
- Church website (with a way to manage weekly announcements)
- Church Newsletter (at least one for the Church members, and optionally another one for a general audience/community)
- Google Ads Grant ($10,000/month in free advertising)
- A way to get more online reviews from guests and Church members
We can help you with a lot of these in our top two packages.
Leveraging Social Media
Social Media doesn’t always help your posts become seen if you post a lot of links. Therefore, you must use social media wisely. We’ve come up with this acronym to help you know what to post when: EEIIRY.
E – Educate
E – Encourage
I – Inform
I – Inspire
R – Remind (remind about the past (#TBT, or Throwback Thursday) or to remind your online audience about upcoming events)
Y – Yield (stop the scroll or yield to God)
You can learn more about our social media methods in this short video:
Utilizing Video Conferencing
While meeting in person is great, we also live in a time where you can have online meetings as well. If you want to meet beyond Sundays and Wednesdays, you may want to encourage your members to get involved in online Bible studies (and start them at your Church). This will also allow more people to join who wouldn’t normally be coming.
Bible Studies beyond Gatherings
If you want, you can create on-demand courses (we actually help with the putting together of these courses; however, we don’t do the filming and editing, rather the creation of online courses for Churches). The Church Management System that we offer Churches helps with this. You can learn more about the software here: https://faithventuremedia.com/church-growth-resource-library/#your-new-church-management-system–pdf-introduction-to-the-chms-we-offer-churches.
Webinars
Similarly to Bible Studies beyond your gatherings, webinars are another great resource. A webinar is an online training that people sign up about a certain topic. While there’s usually something for sale when used in business, Churches can take advantage of this format to help their Church grow and reach more people. We have access to webinar software that we can help you use; however, we don’t have a specific package with this in it quite yet; so, if you get a done-for-you package from us and mention that you want to try webinar software for your Church, we’d love to consider helping you implement it in your Church.
Conclusion
There are probably over a million different combinations you could try to grow your Church with just online methods. The goal of online isn’t simply to be online. It’s to reach more people with the Gospel of Christ. Ministry isn’t a simple thing – it’s complex, and it gets harder with every passing year, as there are more distractions than ever. Online methods are reaching people where they are, so you should consider using online methods.
We have several packages to help your Church grow online (an academy, coaching packages, and done-for-you packages). Get a proposal here today for one or more of our packages: https://faithventuremedia.com/get-a-proposal.