You hear a lot of talk these days about being missional. It’s now a cool new buzz-word in Christian circles. There is lot of missional ministry talk going on over expensive and frothy coffee these days. But in all the missional talk, how well does a church plug in the missional walk?
Being missional is not about wearing hip threads to church on Sunday when you preach, or how slick your church’s marketing materials look, or even what kind of music you select for your worship service. It is about how you plan every aspect of your ministry with specific people’s needs in mind. The starting point for being missional (being more like a missionary) is to learn to research the people you want to reach so you can meet people at the point of their real needs.
You can tell how really interested a church is in being missional by gauging their interest in doing community research. Being missional means being a good student of people.
I have worked with churches that make a lot of talk about being missional, but in the end they are only talking. When I ask them if they did any research they say, “Oh, yeah, we pulled some demographics for our community a couple years ago. We did all that.” Then, when I ask them to show me the information, they can’t find it because it is in a file (or fancy notebook on a bookshelf) they can’t seem to locate. They do not use the information that they have in ministry planning much at all.
As a ministry marketing coach, you can be a part of helping churches understand who is living around them. Only when churches understand their community, can they assess people’s needs and link their ministry to solutions that get their attention. When they begin to build bridges with people based on real life needs, they will reach more people than ever before!
Being missional is also about how open you are to making sure every segment of your community has the opportunity to hear the gospel, even if it won’t help your church grow. For example, you may need to lead your church to plant another church. (Remember the Waffle?)
This will separate the missional talkers from the missional walkers. What if more effectively reaching your community meant your handing over the reigns to new leadership? What if you had to work your way out of a job, directing all your ministry work to eventually being handed over to be lead by another person of a different ethnic group or another background? If you did that, you would be doing exactly what every missionary is supposed to do–you would be truly missional.
This is exactly what needs to happen in churches that are located in transitional communities around the United States.
Two Powerful Tools to Help You Get In-Touch with Your Congregation and Your Community
In the next few posts I will talk about the tools you can use in your quest to become more missional in your church planning by using primary and secondary research.
- Primary Research is original research you do in your community to help you understand the needs and perceptions of the people you want to reach. You could do interviews, conduct surveys, gather focus groups, make visits to locations in your target area, etc.
- Secondary Research is getting all the information that is already available about your community in the form of data developed by others. This includes gathering certain geographical information, using demographics, analyzing psychographics, and finding other information that is available about the people in your community.
Research sounds so technical. I mean, after all, don’t you have to have a white lab coat and carry around slide rules to be able to do research? Don’t worry! Research is not as hard as it may sound to you. I promise, you won’t need to handle or torture any small rodents for your studies!
Every missionary (and every ministry leader wanting to be missional) should learn to master the data about the people they seek to reach. But what I find with most churches is they only pay scant attention to the goldmine of information that is already available about the people they want to reach. Knowing more about the people in their community could help them develop better ministry. If they only knew what they don’t know!
Common marketplace data that are used by business leaders, secular marketers and government development organizations can be very helpful in developing an understanding of the needs of people and help churches develop targeted communication. The community will tell you how to reach them, if you will only listen.
The Hypothetical Target Audience
I have worked with a lot of ministry leaders, missionaries, and even church marketing professionals who don’t understand how to use data to help in ministry communication planning. Most don’t want to admit their ignorance of the community around them. Be careful when you help people as a coach, you don’t want to make them feel like you think they are unintelligent; you want to “create a craving” (as Ginger Sinsabaugh MacDonald would say) for using research.
When I ask churches if they have a target audience, most say they do not. (Some even try to convert me to think that having a target audience is wrong. But we covered that in the theology section of this seminar.) When I find churches who say they do have a target, they usually mean they have developed a hypothetical profile of the people they want to reach.
They describe their targets as variations or combinations of the following:
- “Young Families with Children”
- “Postmodern Emerging Generation”
- “The Radically Unchurched”
- “Men”
- “Stay-at-home Moms”
- “Spanish speakers”
- “Multi-ethnic”
- “College Students”
- “Youth”
- “Saddleback Sam” (Usually a variation of Saddleback’s target from the book “The Purpose Driven Church” with a local name superimposed over the exact same description)
These are only hypothetical targets because the churches have not actually researched these audiences; they just use the hypothetical titles for planning. Often the target is a composite of the “median” demographics in the community. Ever met an actual “median person?”
Some of the leading ministries who do have target audiences named, have no real understanding of their targets beyond the general names. When asked how they plan using their target, you see they don’t really use secondary and primary data to understand them.
There is a lot of “ball parking” and talk about anecdotal experiences with the target. They have not had surveys or focus groups—many times they haven’t even done a site visit where they target.
Using the list above, the churches don’t know how many actual young families live in the vicinity of their church. They could not give you a mailing list or locations where “emergent people” are living.
They seek to reach men, women or families, but often use stereotypes that don’t apply to people in the real world. (What percentage of men really like hunting or golf?)
I have seen churches rip-off the target audience profiles from other churches. How can your church reach Saddleback Sam? (Get a load of the jumbo cell phone and king-sized beeper–gag me with a spoon, fer real!) You can’t, he lives in Orange County, California circa 1980.
Finally, Hispanics, multi-ethnic people, College students, youth, etc are not as clearly a defined target audience as it might seem, since there is so much variation within these groupings.
A church could improve their marketing if they used these hypothetical audiences as the starting point for conducting original research. But they do need to do the research. Naming the target is only half the job. And what if the people you say you want to reach don’t actually exist in your community? You will never know until you do the research.
Let’s look at the kinds of data that is available and talk about how to leverage data in ministry communication planning…
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