Let’s say you wanted to lead your congregation into being more a faith community and less an institution.

More a people called out of the world (the meaning of ekklesia) by the transformative power of faith, and less a people gathered inside walls, around an altar, where rituals of belonging make them feel safe and loved.

I see four practical ways we can reach outside the walls of our inherited institutional understanding – and thereby become more the community that Jesus called into being.

Speak widely and in the languages of the world

The church has a long history of speaking mainly to itself. If we are to have a future, we need to speak to people quite unlike ourselves. Chances are they will be differently educated, less constrained by the rituals of white society, less familiar with Christian ideas, and less interested in belonging to someone else’s institution. They won’t fit our stereotypes.

The common language we share won’t be English or Western intellectual ideas or middle- and upper-class folkways. Even our most basic in-house language will come across as stilted. Instead, we will need to speak in the common language of our shared humanity. That will mean personal stories, not intellectual assertions. It will mean the pastor telling his or her faith story as a person who has been touched by grace, not as an institutional leader.

I am encouraging pastors to develop a weekly blog that ventures far beyond the institution and speaks instead to other parents, other citizens worried about bigotry, other people making their way in a challenging world. This blog should have a large and widely dispersed audience, maybe several thousand people, and not engage in any of the usual “come to my church” appeals. If the pastor has time for only one blog, let it be this blog speaking to the wider world. Build your list by using every opportunity to harvest email addresses.

Give constituents social media tools

Chances are that your constituents have Facebook accounts. The average Facebook user has 250 “friends.” A congregation of 200 people has the potential to reach 50,000 people through social media. Tapping Facebook’s potential takes some skills. I suggest you teach your people those skills. How to post a video, for example, how to use “likes” and “shares” to pass around messages, how to speak about something such as a great sermon in a way that engages others, and how to use personal pages and groups.

Then give them videos to share, photos to share, web site links and Facebook groups. Teach them not to keep inviting people to Sunday worship – the lame invitation that inevitably comes across as self-serving. Instead, teach them how to share their delight in doing God’s work, such as feeding the hungry. Create giving venues such as ways to give food remotely. Trust the power of a pebble dropped in a large pond to change lives.

Enhance your visibility in the community

Most churches think they are more visible than they actually are. People don’t see our buildings, read our signs, or scan our ads. For all practical purposes, we are invisible to the world. Making more noise about Sunday worship will lead nowhere. We need to communicate ourselves as people making a difference in the community. Pastors, leaders and members should be serving in town boards, mission boards, service clubs. Instead of spending their time serving the members, pastors should be seeking visibility in the larger community.

Track connections

People aren’t “data.” People are personalities, yearnings, actions, beliefs. But to touch those deeper aspects of people’s lives, we need to know who they are, where they live, how to reach them, and whether they are responding to us. Those touches are data. We need to manage touches.

If a person meets our pastor at a Rotary meeting, for example, and seems interested in a conversation, we need to capture that information, follow up on it, and track that person’s engagement. That process, in the tech world, is called “customer relationship management.” It’s the lifeblood of any sales process.

There’s no magic to these four steps to engage the larger world. They simply require intentionality and effort.
 

About the Author

Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media