Stop waiting for them to come to you.

Today was Easter (or yesterday depending on when I post this), one of two days each year that “non believers” feel some sort of guilt for not coming to church.  Need to make their appearance or some other nonsense. I don’t get it.  Any who, today was a great opportunity to pitch your church to potential samplers.  How did you do?  Attendance was up right?  Of course it was, who are we kidding.  It’s like lunch time at Costco.  Hungry customers hitting up the sample carts.  But that’s easy stuff, they just come to you.  Well, people need Jesus all the time, and they aren’t always in the mood for samples.

We have so many tools these days to reach people where they are.  They no longer have to step into your church for you to hear their questions, see their needs, or listen to their story.  Social media has opened the door to where people play out their lives online, sometimes not realizing that they are doing so.  A question may be tweeted with no anticipation of an answer.  “Why me?” “Is it Friday yet?” “Can’t I just get a break?” “It’s Easter, guess I need to go to church today.”  Woo, did you just see that?  I sure did. To me, that was begging for a response. So, I did.

Twitter has an amazing search tool for finding topics that are being tweeted about. Through this tool I was able to input the general area of the campus I was at, put in a key word (church) and set my search radius, then just sit back and wait.  I saw lots of tweets about people heading to church, people leaving church, even people skipping church because of being out too late.  I also saw tweets of people looking for churches to go to and fears about going.  So, I replied.  I tweeted back to total strangers with quick messages, service times, and links to our internet campus. So simple.

This is how we leverage social media, to meet people where they are.  Tweeting to your followers is like preaching to the choir.  Song titles and message topics are nice, but there is so much more to the social game than just giving out information.  Social is social, they don’t call it static media.  Stop waiting for them to come to you, go find them.