Five Tips for Improving Community in Your Church

The following is from doxopolis.com.  I thought you might like it.

Most churches struggle with the same challenges when it comes to building community – what to do from Sunday afternoon through to the next Sunday morning. Fortunately, churches nationwide are innovating with technology to drive deeper community and engagement of their members well beyond Sunday morning.

Whether you’re dabbling with community strategies or ready to implement a community and communication accelerator like The City here are five tips to get you started:

1. Have a bias for action. So many choices, so many different options to consider, tools to use, and church leaders and constituents to consider. Rather than wait until the ideal solution is ready, get started now. Check out what other churches are already doing, and test it with a subset of your church community to get quick feedback and momentum.

2. Let the people decide. Rarely does a successful church community strategy come directly and solely from church leadership. Let your members decide with their voices, votes and action what’s going to work best for your unique church community. Want advice on which technology tools will work best? Ask your most tech-savvy members what they recommend, and ask your tech-savvy peers at other churches what has worked well for them.

3. Don’t overthink the launch. Many churches create community strategies and want a big launch. To be more successful more quickly, launch right now and let momentum grow though usage, early-adopter enthusiasm and word of mouth.

4. Publish “digests” of community activity to both active users as well as non-users. Make it easy for everyone to keep up with what the community is doing via daily or weekly emails of summarized activity. Use these summaries to keep everyone more engaged, and also draw in those who might not be active in the community yet.

5. Offer little to no moderation of content. This can be the hardest for church leaders to adopt, but it’s important to fostering an authentic, vibrant church community – especially in online and member-to-member channels beyond Sunday. Trust your members to talk about the church, their faith, their relationship with Jesus, as well as things not about the church at all. By letting community members drive the discussion, you’ll draw even more members to the conversation.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:02 pm. It is filed under Innovate4Jesus. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.