Tweet This

“What’s your church doing that’s worth talking about?” asks Kevin Hendricks at ChurchMarketingStinks.com. He offers two examples he found recently on Twitter: Cause Community Church in Brea, California, had 216 people take it to the table in an arm wrestling contest. They posted video.

Meantime, North Coast Church in nearby Vista posted video from one of 190 service projects they’re doing. They cleaned up a school that was the site of a shooting last year, and the local news team covered it.

And people are talking.

“Social media isn’t the only way to communicate, but it’s fast becoming the most popular …. Twitter will not save your church. Facebook will not directly cause your attendance numbers to go up. What they will do is allow you a chance to interact 24/7 with the people who call (or may call) your church home. The best thing people can do is to simply start. Two tweets a day. Start a fan page. Add a video of your worship team to Vimeo or YouTube. Anything to just get started.”

—Justin Wise, founder of BeDeviant.com and organizer of the Social Media Summit, October 23, in Des Moines, Iowa (from churchmarketingstinks.com)

Pope Accused of Poaching

Two Episcopal congregations in the U.S. are taking the Vatican’s offer to convert to Catholicism, apparently keeping their church properties and their married ministers. St. Luke’s Episcopal parish in Bladensburg, Maryland will become the first Anglican church to turn Catholic under a new streamlined process aimed at disaffected Protestants who object to the ECUS’s stance on gay relationships and the ordination of women. “Critics accused the pope of poaching converts,” says USA Today, “but the Vatican said Benedict XVI was only responding to requests from Anglicans.”

The second congregation, Mt. Calvary of Baltimore, is negotiating retention of property rights with its Episcopal hierarchy before joining the Catholic church.

—USA Today (June 2011)

Conveners of Change

“The church has a stockpile of leaders inside its walls who we must begin to scatter in a strategic manner out into the community. … Transformation will slowly take place if we do. But we must be more than participants in our culture; we must be conveners of change as well.”

—Chip Sweney of Perimeter Church, Atlanta in A New Kind of Big (Baker Books, 2011)