Church Marketing Sucks

Many of you were with us through our entire series on Church From a Visitor’s Perspective. Others of you haven’t checked it out yet. For those of you who missed it, here’s what we’ve been looking at the past few weeks.

• Church from a Visitor’s Perspective
• A Visitor’s Perspective: An Embarrassing Problem
• A Visitor’s Perspective: The Welcoming Paradox
• A Visitor’s Perspective: Watch your Language!
• A Visitor’s Perspective: Verbose Nomenclature
• A Visitor’s Perspective: I Must Be in the Front Row!
• A Visitor’s Perspective: One is the Loneliest Number
• A Visitor’s Perspective: A Visit from the Mystery Worshipper
• A Visitor’s Perspective: The Strangers Among Us

David Zimmerman, our guest blogger who penned this series, had some great lessons for us. As always, so did you, our readers. Here are a few of the many comments you guys added to the discussion …

• “Church is uncomfortable … Where else do you sing songs while staring at a trippy powerpoint with people you don’t know, eat a cracker, take a shot of juice, drop money into a crushed velvet bag and listen to one dude talk about events we weren’t at and worlds we can’t see… -Aaron Marshall on Church from a Visitor’s Perspective
• “As a visitor, I want at least one person to shake my hand, tell me their name, ask for my name, and pretty much feign interest in getting to know me. I don’t want that person to be wearing a badge, name-tag, or shirt with the church logo thereby indicating that they are getting to know me because it is their job.” -Revolutionfl on The Welcoming Paradox
• “Sometimes I refer to ‘fellowship’ as the ‘f-word.'” -David on Verbose Nomenclature
• “Sporting events & theater are NOT the same thing as weekly worship services … when I attend a concert, I expect everyone in the room to be a fan like me. If we intend for our churches to be open to seekers, then by definition they aren’t fans yet.” -Mark Jackson on I Must Be in the Front Row
• “When we were in our building at three services, our services were packed out, and we realized that we weren’t growing — like, at all. As soon as we moved into the new rented facility, our attendance shot up, visitor retention improved. It really made a difference.” -Megan on One Is the Loneliest Number

Also, if you really loved this series and the idea of church from a visitor’s perspective, David linked to this article you should check out. It’s the perspective of thirty non-religious reporters for a Seattle paper visiting places of worship.

More:

• Learn more about how to welcome church visitors with this massive collection of resources and blog posts.
• Walking into a church for the first time can be scary. Check out Unwelcome: 50 Ways Churches Drive Away First-Time Visitors by Jonathan Malm for practical ideas and perspective on first-time guests.