So you’ve made good use of your Church Management Software (CMS), and you have some new prospective members who are beginning to interact with your congregation, perhaps even showing up in worship for a few Sundays. What’s next? How do we begin, particularly in larger congregations, to move people from attending to belonging?

In my last post, I laid out what landing pages are and why they are important in communicating to your target audience. I wrote about how the retail industry uses landing pages, and hopefully you did your homework to see how effectively the industry uses them to communicate targeted information to its customers.

Landing pages. Maybe you have heard of them before, maybe you haven’t. Maybe you know all about them, maybe you don’t. Landing pages are not new, and we have all been sent to one, whether we knew it or not.

Maybe you’re just now considering creating a landing page for your church, or maybe you’re a website designer who’s looking to take your site to a new level. In this first of a series of posts, I’ll help you navigate the basics of landing pages and learn how they can be used for specific opportunities and events for your church.

I love how diverse our churches are. Of course, we all have the Gospel in common, and we also share many similar rites and ceremonies, but the way we dress, the type of music we use, and the way our churches operate varies greatly depending on our context.

Anytime we set out to talk about ways to manage church members’ information, targeted advertising, or other efforts to use technology in outreach, we need to start from the right perspective. None of our cleverness, targeting, or planning can make the Gospel more effective—that’s the Holy Spirit’s job, not ours. What we’re seeking to do with communication, advertising, and technology is to remove barriers to people hearing the Gospel and to ensure that God’s Word is able to speak as clearly as possible to those who need to hear it. This month and for the next several months, we will be looking not at efficacy, but at clarity and removing noise from our communications.

Sociologists maintain that you can learn a lot about looking in people’s medicine cabinets. In the same vein, I believe a narthex tells a lot about a congregation. When I visit a congregation, I notice so many things:

Nothing will stop a project faster than a lack of communication. To fill the gap, misinformation will quickly spread. This will lead to ever increasing amounts of frustration from leaders to stakeholders until overall apathy envelops the project. In turn, the project will stall out or people will come to resent it.

Once upon a time, when the web was young and HTML was new, each web page was its own self-contained piece of content. All of the content and formatting that was required for that page was contained on the page itself in the HTML code, and interactive ideas such as JavaScript were mere ideas and not practice. This worked well at first, but then the day came when someone needed to redesign the look of their website. Perhaps colors needed to be changed or a new logo used. Regardless, the whole site had to change, and that meant changing every single page on the site. And no one—literally no one—wants to do that twice.

One of the greatest blessings we have as a church is that we have such amazing ways to share our faith. In the past, information and stories had to be passed down orally. Later on, with the invention of the printing press, books of information could be produced quickly and shared. At the beginning of my lifetime, we still received information primarily from our televisions and in the mail.

Lutheran schools and churches have always gone hand in hand. Martin Luther, all the way back in 1530, wrote “A Sermon on Keeping Children in School,” and he was quite the revolutionary as he called for the education of not only boys but girls as well.

This desire to educate our children was kept by the Saxon (and other) immigrants who would form the Missouri Synod. In Germany, religious instruction was a part of the public school curriculum. In America, however, the public schools were much more secular, or the Christianity that was taught in them was generic and watered down. So in many places, Lutherans established their schools first and then, a few years later, built their church.