Find your chair & Take a seat
The Christian Church began as a movement of Jesus followers who were commanded to "Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit." (Matthew 28:19, NLT) How will the church move forward to continue fulfilling this calling?
Consider the analogy of a chair.
A perfect chair is one that holds a sitting person. Chairs can look very different, yet still fulfill their purpose. Instead of trying to fit into the look and feel of other church’s “chairs”, find your unique “chair” and sit in it. Only then will you be able to perfectly fulfill God’s mission for your local church. The American Church is filled with 20% or less of our people providing 80% of the work and support. It is made up of people who have attended church their whole life and have never experienced life-transformation. Outside our walls there is growing number of people who think of the church as judgmental, inconsequential, and anything but like Jesus. As hard as it may be to swallow, this is the brand of the church in the United States. A brand lives in the mind of the people; it's not what you say it is, it's what people think it is. - Have you ever stopped to think about the brand of your local church? - What do the people in your church say about your church? What do they think is the most important thing? - What do the people in your community say about your church? Is it a proper representation of who you think you are?
The Purpose of this Seminar
1. Grab your Chair To discover how your church community is unique and will fulfill Christ's calling to make disciples in a different way than the church down the street or in the next town.
2. Take a Seat To equip each local church to live out their purpose of love through a focused strategy. When your messaging is focused, it will be consistent. A consistent message will begin to break down the dichotomy between perception and reality.
This one day seminar will be a soul-searching time of discovering the truth (the good, the bad, and the ugly) about who you are as a local church community and how communicating that truth to the outside world will bring cohesion between what people think about you and what they experience when then encounter your church. This is the essential starting point for dealing with issues of growth, engagement, assimilation, and significance.
"Branding is the process of understanding and articulating who you are- both for yourself and to the outside world." Eric Karjaluoto Speak Human
This seminar is not about creating a better marketing strategy in order to sell your church and Jesus to the unchurched world.
This seminar is about deciding that it is time for the church to finally be honest about who we really are, to open the lines of communication between how the world perceives us and if that is really true, and to be brave enough to take the next steps of communicating the truth about ourselves and why that makes Jesus’ life and example so important.