A New Vision For Churches and Congregations

Welcome to A New Vision for Churches and Congregations! This site is dedicated to helping make your churches more visible to your neighborhoods. Keep looking around the site, and you’ll find ideas and tools you can use to help your church go “outside the box” with evangelism, outreach, and missions.

Do you sometimes get frustrated with the fact that your church isn’t growing? Let us help you with inexpensive ideas that will help your members feel more comfortable inviting their friends and neighbors to worship and other activities.

Take your time and look around at our articles and links, and email us at 2010newvision@gmail.com if you have ideas, suggestions, and most importantly, questions. We’re here to help!

Even as some of us deny websites and other social media outlets, and overlook the fact that our congregations are actively engaged on the internet, newspapers are going out of business, civic engagement is at an all-time high online (especially, according to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, “the wealthy and well-educated”), and nearly half of U.S. adults are using a social networking service. As far as the “digital divide” goes, 79 percent of U.S. adults are now Internet users — a 67 percent increase from 2005 — and 59 percent of Americans have accessed the Web from a wireless device. Clearly, we’re past the point of “oh, our folks don’t use the Internet or social networking!”

So, why our reluctance? The answer consists of four parts: 1) a misunderstanding of how to use the medium; 2) difficulty measuring results; 3) ignorance; and 4) the “we’ve always done things this way” inertia effect.

Luckily, conquering these objections isn’t difficult. It just takes education, logical thinking, and flexibility. Here are some tips: Continue Reading »

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

The Catholic population of the United States rose from 67,117,016 to 68,115,001 between the beginning and end of 2008– an increase of 1.49%, according to the recently published 2010 Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches. In 2007, the Catholic population had fallen by nearly 400,000.

Also reporting increases in 2008 were the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (ranked 4th), Assemblies of God (9th), Jehovah’s Witnesses (22nd), and the Tennessee-based Church of God (24th).

The reference book offers a statistical survey of Catholics, Protestants, and groups such as the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses but does not rank Jews and Muslims. Mainline Protestant communities such as the Presbyterian Church (USA) (10th) and the Episcopal Church (15th) continued to suffer steep declines. More conservative Protestant bodies such as the Southern Baptist Convention (2nd) and the Lutheran Church — Missouri Synod (14th) lost members as well.