Church Assimilation and Growth

Gathering People when they need Your Church

All churches need to read this article. Why? Most churches miss many opportunities to gather new people. There are simple ways a church can bring in numerous visitors each month. For most churches, being able to gather 10 to 20+ additional visitors a month can make a big difference. Here are two techniques that helped Kaleo Church grow 100% over the last 6-months. We are amazed that roughly 40-50 new people a month visit Kaleo from these techniques. The good news is, any church can replicate these simple techniques and gather people.

NOTE: These are methods that we use. We believe all increase is given from God who gathers His people into His great plan.

Scenario 1: Gathering Newly Weds to your Church

This fall, six couples joined Kaleo's eight week pre-marriage class.The remarkable thing is, only one of these couples had attended Kaleo formore than three-months prior to the class. The other couples sought out achurch because they decided to get married. Marriage is one of those events that cause people to reflect on their life, and frequently, people want to find a church to help them in this season. These people often bring (drag?) their non-Christian fiancé to church with them. It is in this moment, that the church has a great opportunity to communicate the gospel.

Pre-marriage classes are just one of the many opportunities your church has to gather people into Kingdom mission. There are numerous windows in people's lives such as pregnancy, moving, job loss, children growing up, marriage, death, counseling, etc. But let me explain how 10 people joined our church using pre-marriage as the example.  Several months ago, Kaleo created a page on our website about San Diego pre-marriage counseling. When couples in our area search for pre-marriage counseling, Kaleo ranks #1 out of about 2,000,000 pages on Google [and who doesn’t use Google?]. All five of the couples found uson the internet. (More couples contacted us but opted against our 8-week Pre-Marriage course once they learned about our adherence to Scripture). [Learn more: Gather through Church Premarriage Counseling or join the Wedding Cloud a site we have created to help local churches replicate this..] The sixth couple (and dozens more) found us through the scenario discussed next…

Scenario 2: Gathering People who move to your town

Another common way people find Kaleo is when they move to town. San Diego is a fairly transitional town, (people don't always stay long because they can't afford the half-million median home price!) with numerous military bases, colleges and a heavy tourist industry. We have spent considerable time to ensure our website is optimized for 'San Diego Church' and 'San Diego Churches' where we usually come in between #1 to 4 out of 28.5 and 21.6 million results respectively.

But even more valuable than this, has been a network of locally targeted websites. For example, one local site receives over 160 people per day (on average) who access the website from search engines to find a church.This number continues to grow; there are days where the site tops 700 unique visitors a day. Even at 160 visitors, this means about 60,000 people a year will use the site to find a church in this area. We found that most of the searches are people who are actively seeking a church to join. This local project has been extremely effective, and now a new site has been created to target your city. In September, (Church Cloud) was launched to help people find a church anywhere in the world. The goal is to influence 1,000,000+ people per year to attend churches. This means helping thousands of people find and decide to attend a recommended church like yours. [Sign-up to participate in the ChurchCloud website.]

The churches and pastors whose churches are on our network of websites have grown as a result. (see sidebar testominials) Each of them report they receive between two to 15 new guests a Sunday who visit after coming from an EKklesia Network website.

The Future of the Church & Technology

These two techniques are just simple ways churches can use technology for the advancement of the gospel. Last month, Barna Research published a report of the use of technology in churches. The report found that the number of churches with a website on the Internet grew from 34% in 2000 to 57% in 2005.(It amazes me at how low these numbers are.) Yet 84% of large churches (those with 250 or more people) had a website. Our research indicates that small churches, even recent church plants, can outperform these large churches on the internet. Often the time it takes for a large church to make decisions through a bureaucratic process diminishes their ability to capitalize on newer technology and techniques. Additionally, powerful dynamic sites, once only affordable to the richest of churches, have become commoditized for small church plants to use cutting edge technology. We're seeing more and more people find and select churches based on their experience with the website.

Ekklesia is designedto achieve top ranking results. All pages and code created will be optimized for specific church-related keywords and themes to attract targeted visitors to the site. These keywords will target search engines spiders which will results in more visitors finding the website through online searches.The end result is increased 'virtual' visitors to your church and'physical' visitors to your church services. Your website willnow provide you a significant tool to gather people to your church.

Next Steps

Contact us to schedule a demo today!