By The Rev. Shawn Rutledge
Vicar, St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, Casa Grande
For decades a major focus in most churches has been church vitality and “How do we get more folks through our doors? And once they’re here, how do we get them to stay?”. Church leaders everywhere are constantly looking for a magic button solution to this problem.
For the last couple of years, St. Peter’s in Casa Grande has been one of the churches in our diocese participating in the flagship VIP (Vitality Improvement Program) initiative in partnership with FaithX. The idea of the program is to increase church vitality through raising the church’s profile in the community.
While the concept is simple, it’s not necessarily quick or easy to put into action because the ‘how’ of it all has to be tailored to your specific community. What makes your church different from the one down the street, and how do you get that info out to folks in a genuine way? While it may seem like a marketing problem on the surface, it’s a lot more involved than that, and like most things worth doing it takes both time and effort.
The multi-year program seemed to start slowly, with surveys of the congregation, and deep dives into the demographics of the neighborhood immediately surrounding the church and the city within a 15-minute drive from the church. It was hard to gauge the value of that information at first, and it wasn’t the most fun thing to gather and examine.
As we really looked at that information though, over multiple months, we started to learn things about ourselves as a congregation that we hadn’t looked at closely before. It challenged us to not give knee-jerk responses like, “Oh we’re already good at that” or “Oh our ministries are already robust”. After all, if everything was perfect, where were all the people? Why weren’t we pulling in newcomers every week and adding them to the rolls? It forced us to be honest about what we might look like to an outsider and to think about what was true about us that we wanted them to see.
The fact was, we were a small congregation with a lot of very loyal and faithful parishioners, who were very passionate about their church, but somehow that passion wasn’t increasing our church vitality. And the things that we were most passionate about were our acts of service to the community. The VIP program challenged us to name that, own that, and come up with ways to make that passion seen in and around the community.
Almost two years later, we have a mission that names our community involvement, and we’re hearing from folks outside of our church community about how active our members are in serving and helping the community. And we’re getting newcomers, and they’re staying. Newcomers not only feel welcomed, they feel invited to participate in actively living their faith out in the community through acts of service.
The VIP program through FaithX is working for us. It helped guide us into being better at being who we already were, and showing that to others in the community. Would it work for you? It might. Unfortunately, it’s still not a magic button solution. The things that worked for us here at St. Peter’s probably wouldn’t work the same way for your church. Each congregation is unique, and each church’s history and involvement in their community is unique. What I can say is this, each church community could positively benefit from taking a hard look at who they really are, what they’re really good at, and finding new ways to name it, claim it, and lift it up to their community.
This go-round with the VIP program they prioritized doing it on a large scale (multiple churches from the same diocese in the same cohort). But moving forward FaithX is looking at offering the VIP program on a church-by-church basis with diocesan support. If you’re interested in possibly participating in the program in the future, drop me a line, and I’d be glad to talk to you about it further.