So your church has a website and Facebook page—perhaps even Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest. Or maybe you’ve gone all out—podcasting your messages or building an app for iOS or Android. Whatever your church might be doing, my guess is you’re trying to connect with people online in some way. Here’s the question, though: When you welcome people to your church, are you mentioning the helpful, online content you’re publishing? Are you making the most of the opportunity that we now have through social media to connect with people daily?
The Problem
For years, our hosts (including me) said something like this at the beginning of the service as a greeting:
Welcome to Connexus! We’re so glad you’re here. If you’re new here, we’d love to connect! Drop by our guest services desk. We’d love to connect with you there. Today, we’ll be here for about 70 minutes, sing some songs together, open up the Bible to see what it means to us today and pray together.
Then we shared one or two announcements we wanted everyone to know. But do you see what I missed? I said nothing about our online presence.
Nothing about our social media, our app, our podcast. Nothing. Yet 80 percent of the people (or more) are sitting there with phones in their pockets.
The Simple Change
The easiest way to help, encourage, inspire and inform people during the week is via social media and your online presence. So talk about that! This is what we say now when we greet people at Connexus:
Welcome to Connexus! We’re so glad you’re here. If you’re new here, we’d love to connect! Drop by our guest services desk. We’d love to connect with you there. Today, we’ll be here for about 70 minutes, sing some songs together, open up the Bible to see what it means to us today and pray together.
We’d love to stay connected with you this week, too. The easiest way to do that is by following us on social media. You’re welcome to take out your phones right now and follow us on Facebook or Twitter. We also love hearing from you and this is great way to keep up the conversation.
We show the links on the screen as we say them. This small change in what you say when you welcome people is free, easy, instant and everyone can do it!
Carey Nieuwhof is lead pastor of Connexus Church, just north of Toronto, Canada. He blogs at CareyNieuwhof.com and is host of The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. This article was originally published on CareyNieuwhof.com.