03/14/2025
Why Your Marketing (evangelism) Isn’t Working
Rev. Dr. Michael Piazza
Last week in a meeting with my partners at Agile Technology I had a most embarrassing ah-ha. You would think that by now growing a church would be routine for me because I’ve been a pastor since I was 19 years old. In addition to doing consulting work, I’ve also been a professor of Congregational Renewal at Hartford Seminary. So why do I feel so dumb?
Our church recently changed its name to Progressive Spirit United Church of Christ. This reflects our new mission and vision statement and is an expression of just who we are trying to reach in the southern city of Jacksonville, FL. It has always been clear to me that trying to be all things to all people results in a pablum church that excites no one. Finding our niche has worked very well in helping renew our church. In just two years we have increased our membership by 37% and our giving has stabilized to the point where we are able to “give away” our weekly collection. Most importantly, after several years with almost no visitors we are now averaging at least one new family a week and most of them are returning. Sunday in-person attendance has tripled and online we have several hundred more attending and even joining. There is a palpable sense of excitement in a church that came close to death after COVID.
This makes my revelation all the more embarrassing. At I talked to my technology partner, I described how every week I ask first time visitors how they found us? Asking that question has long been a practice of mine. Once upon a time the most common answer was that someone had invited them. That has changed dramatically though. Today 100% of those I ask say that they did an online search and went to our website. While that may not seem revolutionary to you, I believe this insight changes everything. No longer should we spend our energy and scarce resources trying to get people to visit our building, but we need to be trying to attract people to our websites. It is our front door more than ever. They will visit it first and then MAYBE come to our facility.
This means that our websites must be attractive, user friendly and “sticky”. If my insight is correct then we need to focus as much on our website and its optimization as we do on making our building pretty and welcoming. If you want more information on how to do that I’d suggest contacting the folks at Agile Technology… unlike me, they “got it” long ago.
