VANCO BLOG

Technology innovation within the church is nothing new. It’s likely you have a website and are communicating with members by email and digital newsletters. In doing so, you’ve already adopted technology that goes a long way in keeping you in conversation with your community.

Many churches — perhaps yours included — budget for the year based on church population, average total attendance and median giving per person per year. We also know that summer attendance tends to drop far below the average for other times of the year.

If attendance equals giving, and summer equals low attendance, the vital question is: How can your church stay connected with members as they focus on beach trips and summer camp instead of your June and July worship series?

Since its earliest days, the American church has been a place where neighbors came together, growing a community through shared experiences and social opportunities. People valued being seen at church on Sunday and involved throughout the week. Children learned values in church and developed relationships that often lasted a lifetime. In every town and city, the steeples were the highest point on the horizon, and the churches were just as central to the shape of the community and its culture.

I recently watched the Will Smith movie Collateral Beauty, which centers on his character, Howard, and his response to a terrible loss. The unusual title — indeed, the theme of the movie — is illuminated during a conversation in which an older woman tells a younger one not to miss the collateral beauty in a death she is facing.

We’re living in an age of connectedness. Terms like sharing economy, peer-to-peer and crowdsource have leapt from concepts to accepted norms. From offerings like Airbnb to Indiegogo, Americans are actively creating ways to combine resources and help one another experience more, do more

So much of the church’s celebration of Easter is based on common beliefs and similar rituals. But how people observe the holiday outside those walls varies greatly.

While the tide of giving to churches rises at Easter, we know that it typically ebbs afterward. Giving to churches continues to decline, and the percentage of members who tithe is significantly less than the traditional percentage of the tithe itself: It hovers somewhere between 1.5% and 4%, judging by the most recent figures from a variety of sources.

When it comes to managing change, thinking carefully about who and what it will impact is key. You may be integrating a new e-Giving solution, introducing an outreach program or starting a different worship service, but in every case, emotions will be involved, and people will seek understanding and time to process what the change means to them.

We are in an era when change is a constant, and the reasons for nurturing an active spirit of progress, whether we’re talking about technology, programs, services or any other aspect of the church, are more numerous every year.

Easter is Christianity’s oldest and most important holiday, and for many churches, it’s a bit like the religious “Super Bowl” – full of anticipation, preparation and celebration for huge numbers of people who may not have shown interest throughout the rest of the year.