By Ken Howard
FaithX President and Founder
During the lazy days of summer, my wife and I like to visit places we’ve never been… yet. Not just faraway places, but places nearby, sometimes neighborhoods virtually around the corner. And not just seeing new places but also meeting new people.
This year, for our faraway place, we will be going to Iceland (how cool is that… literally). And for our nearby place, we will be going to Cannon Beach, in our home state of Oregon, not because we haven’t been there, but because we’ve never been there during the Cannon Beach Annual Sandcastle building contest. We hope to meet new people in both places.
Summer is a slow time for most congregations, too. It will be months before a new program year gets rolling. And every Sunday, a significant number of congregants are out for vacation.
This is a great time to visit a few neighborhoods you’ve never been to and get to know some of the people that live there. Odds are, you will not only find some people who are very much like you but also people who are very different from you. Odds are, you will find some people facing the same neighborhood challenges you are facing in yours, but also some facing very different ones. And as a wise person once said, “Challenges are Opportunities in Disguise.” You might discover issues that your congregation is uniquely gifted to address; issues that resonate with your congregation’s mission.
What?
You think you already know the makeup of all the neighborhoods that make up the larger community in which God has placed your congregation?
I can assure you that you do not. Without exception, every congregation I’ve worked with encounters what I call the “Holy Crap” moment, when they discover that there are neighborhoods within a 15-minute drive populated by people groups they never knew lived there. I’ve had pastors who were willing to “swear on the Bible” (figuratively, of course) that there were no Latinos in their community, only to have me drive them to a mercado five minutes away. Or tell me there were no young adults in their area, only to have me walk them across the street that was home to 900 millennials.
Why are we blind to neighborhoods with people different than us? Because it’s human nature to seek the comfort of the people who are most like us.
It’s not enough to be a friendly congregation. Just because you open the doors of your worship center, doesn’t mean they will come to you. If you want to reach them, you need to, as one person saltily said, “get out of the damn building.” Get out and go to where they live. Demonstrate that your congregation is not just friendly, but inviting.
That’s where FaithX can help.
With our interactive, infographic Neighborhood Insights Report, we can reveal to you more than 40 important things about your neighborhoods: dominant population segments, average age, average income, population growth (or decline), crime, giving characteristics, and much, much more.
We can also use our MissionMaps tool to show you the above characteristics, neighborhood-by-neighborhood, so you can pinpoint where you have to go to find the people that your congregation is currently missing.
Want to learn more? Contact us at info@faithx.net.
Finally, now that the FaithX team has shared with you our personal stories about what “Summer Is A Time For,” next week we will be asking our readers the same question.
Watch this space next Thursday!
