How does your church approach the task of outreach? There’s a new entry at the provocatively titled blog Church Marketing Sucks (in quality, not philosophically, they mean) that shares one pastor’s methodology: “come and care.”
The pastor, who came to the U.S. from Ghana 20 years ago and has worked at a Boston church for 15 years, says that his congregation has grown because of the people who were already coming. Instead of trying to draw in people from the outside, he says he invested his time in getting the people who were already there to care. As the entry sums it up: “The people who care will get people to come which gets more people to care…and the cycle continues.”
“Come and care.” It’s a mindset that, I’m sure, has already been articulated in many different ways in ministry circles. Yet the simplicity of those three words is, as the blogger says, a “breath of fresh air.”
If your church is currently wrestling over some outreach program or strategy, it might be helpful to step back from the particulars of the situation and reassess your foundational vision. Can you say it in three words? Is it similar to “come and care”?
