CHURCH COMMUNICATIONS
How the UK's Quiet Revival Should Impact Your Church Communications
UK churches are growing. New research from the Bible Society shows that church attendance has grown by over 50% in the last seven years. That’s a lot of new people turning up to church for the first time.
So surely this quiet revival should have an impact on our church communications? Well, I think this is a great opportunity to consider what one of those new people might experience if they turned up at your church for the first time.
For each stage of their journey from discovering your church to actually turning up, I’m going to share a checklist of action points for your church. These aren’t necessarily essential for every church, but hopefully they’re a starting point.
Discover
The first step is for someone to discover your church, and in order for that to happen, you need to have an online presence.
- Online Presence
A church’s online presence could fall anywhere on a scale between just a listing in an online church directory all the way through to having your own website, as well as multiple social media channels.
- Appear in Search
If somebody searches for your church, do you appear on the top of the Google search or are you on the last page of Google?
If you want to make sure that you are appearing when people are using search engines, that means thinking about something called SEO, which stands for Search Engine Optimisation. I’m going to share a few things that you can do to improve your church’s SEO.
Use key search terms throughout your church’s online presence, whether that’s your website or your social media. So think about the kinds of things that people are going to be searching for and use those keywords throughout your website.
The next thing is to have a good site structure, which is a little bit more technical. Make sure you’ve got a good clear hierarchy and your pages all link to each other.
And then finally, search engines love it when you have high quality, up to date content.
- Appear on Social
The quiet revival research found that church growth is particularly significant in the younger age brackets. So for example, among 18 to 24 year olds there’s been a really significant increase in the number of people coming to church.
So it is worth thinking about how that age group use the internet. And Forbes did a study where they found that younger generations are becoming more and more likely to use social media to search for things instead of Google.
Does your church have a presence on things like Instagram or TikTok? Because young people are using those platforms as a search tool. That could be the first place that they go to find a church in their local area.
Consider
Once they’ve discovered you, they’ll then consider whether or not to come along to your church. In order to consider whether your church is gonna be right for them, they need to know a few key things.
- What your church does
Do you have information online about the services that you run? Or about what’s on for young people or for twenties and thirties or for families? Those are the kinds of things that some people are going to be looking for when deciding whether or not to come to your church.
- What your church is like
Maybe include a section of your website that tells people what an average Sunday at your church looks like. Or what your values are, and including things like photos and videos of real people at your church and real activities that are going on. It’s going to really help give people an idea of what your church is like and whether they want to come along and be part of it.
- What your church believes
For some people, this might be really key. They might be looking for churches that believe a specific thing. And so if you can, I think this is a really valuable thing to include in your church’s online presence.
Plan
So once they’ve considered you and they’ve decided they want to come to your church, the next thing that they’re gonna do is plan their visit.
And in order to do that, they need a few bits of information.
- Service Information
It sounds really basic, but do you include things on your website like where your church is and what time the service starts? I’ve been on church websites before where all that information is actually quite hard to find.
A helpful activity to try is to find someone who’s never been on your church website before and ask them to time how long it takes to find the key service information. And hopefully it shouldn’t take them very long!
- FAQ Section
Think about all of the things that could act as a barrier, stopping somebody from coming to church, and then answer whatever questions they bring up.
- Personal Connection
Do you have an opportunity for personal connection? So, for example, do you have an email address that people can contact if they’ve got more questions or an option to let you know that they’re planning on coming to church? That personal connection can be really important for some people before coming along to church.
And interestingly, the Quiet Revival research found that more than a third of young non-church goers would attend church if they were invited. So it’s also worth thinking about how you can encourage people to be inviting their friends to church.
Visit
The final part of somebody’s visit to your church is when they actually visit. And so this is a good opportunity to be thinking about your welcome.
- Welcome
The quiet revival research found that the demographics of church are changing a little bit. So for example, men are more likely to go to church now than women or churches are also becoming more ethnically diverse, especially in younger age brackets. And as we’ve mentioned before, there are more and more young people coming to church, and so I think it’s worth just stopping and thinking about how good your church is at welcoming these different kinds of people, especially given the changing demographics.
- Discipleship
One of the most concerning things that came out of this study was about discipleship. They found that a lot of younger people were actually really struggling when it came to reading the Bible for themselves, even going so far as to say they felt that their faith was being undermined when they read some parts of the Bible. And that’s a real issue, that there are people who are wanting to get stuck into the Bible but struggling to understand it. But it’s a problem that churches can really help with.
Obviously we often do that through preaching, but I wonder if this is actually a really good opportunity to think about how we’re doing online content as well. Could you think about creating social media posts or YouTube content or articles for your website or resources that help solve this problem?
And that kind of content is going to be really helpful, not only for new people, but also for your regular church members who probably need to hear that stuff week after week after week.
Main Takeaway
I think the main takeaway is to be encouraged. I found this research really encouraging when I read through it and there’s lots that we can learn from it. But it’s also true that the main things haven’t changed.
We’re still called to do all the same things as churches (preach the word, make disciples, love one another etc.) but it does give us a really clear opportunity to reflect on specifically our church communications.
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