Is Your Congregation Fishing in a Shallow Pond?

Find out at the CMBA Family Gathering Thursday, August 23rd at the SCBC Building.

Register HERE for the lunch and speaker. (Formerly known as Vision Tuesday.)

Many congregations are only seeking to attract people into church membership who first visit their church, live in their immediate neighborhood, or who are family or friends of members. Little is done to figure out the deeper and larger characteristics of the mission field where God has placed them, much less to figure out if their congregation even matches that mission field.

This is like fishing in a shallow pond where your church is only seeking to catch the people who can be easily seen.

The results are varied. Perhaps the shallow pond in which you are fishing has a bunch of people and many choose to connect with your congregation. There is no need to fish in a deeper or larger lake. You have all you can handle out of the shallow pond.

In other situations, the shallow pond is composed of people uninterested in the bait your congregation is offering them. No matter how many times you stick your pole in the water you come up empty and bait-less.

The situation even exists where your congregation is not interested in connecting with the people in the shallow pond. Seems unchristian, doesn’t it. But it is real in too many congregations.

Gary Hollingsworth, executive director-treasurer of the SC Baptist Convention, and George Bullard would like to invite you to a CMBA Family Gathering on Thursday, August 23rd Noon to 1:45 p.m. at the SC Baptist Convention building. The subject is “The Demographic and Lifestyle Opportunities for the CMBA Context and Churches.” Register HERE.

Guest presenters will be Tom Carringer, a nationally known researcher, and Clay Smith, pastor, Alice Drive Baptist Church in Sumter who has made the most significant use of this research. Many churches use demographic reports when thinking about evangelism, new member recruitment, starting a new campus or congregations, etc. The challenge is that demographic studies only touch the surface of the characteristics of people in your community context. It is possible to go much deeper.

Do you know why you start receiving a certain magazine you never ordered? Why do you get the other advertisements for products you find to be of interest, but you wonder how the sender knew? It has to do with several layers of information deeper than the general categories of psychographics that fit your household into a certain lifestyle group.

Do you ever wonder if your current church members, guests who visit your church, and members of your community context have lifestyles that with ease or difficulty communicate with one another? How can you improve the focus of your congregation to be effective in reaching the people to whom God is sending you?

These are the type of questions this CMBA Family Gathering (previously called Vision Tuesdays) will begin a process of answering for you. All your ministerial and program staff are invited at no charge for the lunch and program. Again, register HERE.

About the author 

Kyndra Bremer