Does anyone know your church exists?

A number of years ago I was scheduled to meet with the pastor search committee of a small church. This was before GPS was available. The chair of the search team had given me directions to the church, but they weren't the best directions I've ever had. It was my first time to be at this church so I was very dependent on the directions to find the church. Once I got off the main highway I realized how poor the directions were. As I drove around the country roads trying to find the markers the church had given me it started to grow dark. I had no cell phone service so I stopped at two houses to ask for directions to the church, but the people at these houses had never heard of the church. It was now about 15 minutes after our meeting was scheduled. I decided to turn around at the next drive way and return home. The next driveway was into the church's parking lot. It was within a mile of the two houses where the people said they had never heard of the church!

It's very hard to grow a church or have an effective ministry if people within a mile of your church has never heard of you. Unfortunately, this is true of many churches. These churches may think their long history and the fact that they "are the friendliest church in the area," should make them well-known, but the reality is that people near them may not even know they exist.

Even larger churches can have this problem. Several people told me to let them know if I was scheduled to preach in their community so they could come to hear me. A larger church in their community did invite me to preach there a few weeks later so I let the folks know that. Even though this was one of the largest churches in their community, none of them knew where it was located. These folks lived within blocks of this large active church, but did not know where it was.

This was a problem for the church I pastored when I first went there. This small, rural church was nearing its 150th anniversary when I became its pastor, but many people had never heard of the church and many others did not know where it was. A few years after I went there we began to intentionally address that problem.

One of our men put up a sign at the highway with the name of the church and an arrow showing where to turn. At the end of that road he put up another sign with another directional arrow that would lead people to the church.

We bought a number of professionally prepared videos that promoted some aspect of ministry featuring our church's name and service times. These video ads were ran for free on our local cable company on select channels. We also purchased a quarterly newspaper that featured positive stories and insights into family living that included one-and-half pages highlighting information about our church that was sent to the homes in our county. Both the videos and the paper gave us an opportunity to minister to people and allowed us to get our church name out into the community.

Today, if I was pastor of a church, we would be active on social media. We would have a web site and a Facebook page promoting the church. Someone has said if your church isn't on social media it doesn't exist. I believe there is a lot of truth in that. A Facebook page is free, and web sites can be very inexpensive so both are possible for even the smallest churches.

When people are interested in knowing about a business the first thing most will do is to check out that business online. If they do not have a web page it's likely the person will be less interested in the business. The same is true when people are wanting information about churches. Not only does your church need to be on social media, your content must be fresh and current. When I'm looking at a web site or a FB site and I see that the last posting was two or three years ago I lose interest. Your social media pages should be updated at least weekly to keep them fresh and appealing to those who are looking at them.

So, do people know your church exists? Are you sure? Can you prove it? How will new people get information about your church? If people cannot get information about your church before they visit, why should they bother visiting? Tough questions, but they need to be asked and answered.