You should be spending as much as 50% of your time on communications, I told a group of clergy at the Kenyon Institute’s “Beyond Walls” writing seminar for religious professionals.

That means time spent blogging to the vast world outside your walls, engaging with prospects, and communicating with your flocks. It means email campaigns, as well as ad hoc emailing. It means creative use of social media, especially Facebook. It means messaging. But always, three audiences, and distinct messages tailored to the questions, hungers, issues, yearnings that actually occupy each audience.

How could we possibly allocate so much time to communicating? some clergy immediately responded.

You will need to stop doing some other things, I replied. Put your time where it will do the most good. Be prepared for resistance from your internal flock, who won’t understand why you are sending a personal blog to people they don’t know. Explain why, and help them to be grateful for your tending to the congregation’s future. For its future certainly lies in people you don’t yet know.

Tell them that you cannot simply announce church events and expect people to show up. That day ended fifty years ago. You need to cultivate leads, build email lists, spend time learning what questions people “out there” are asking. (The state of the church budget surely isn’t one of them.) You need to write and then respond to comments. You need to use the media your audiences use. If they are Facebook people, learn Facebook. If people out there use messaging or Snapchat or Instagram or Twitter, then learn to use those tools. Just as Jesus did, speak in the words and ways that people can hear.

Still, the time issue. Allocation of a clergyperson’s time is always an issue in congregations. Some people want large chunks of it for their personal needs. Some lay leaders enjoy managing their clergy’s schedules. Many get jealous when the pastor “courts” strangers. The issue is control, and it is the false dynamics of marriage that we have allowed to tinge pastor-flock relations.

You, I told the clergy, need to break through those constraints and establish yourself as a thought leader: trustworthy, wise, worth reading, and, you hope, worth knowing in person. That is how you will engage with new constituencies. You are the draw, not the congregation as such. That will be hard for institutionalists to hear. But it is reality.

Eventually, some people you reach will want to know more about your God and about your faith community. They won’t be drawn to worship, as much as they are drawn to mission and community. The payoff won’t be their fanny in a pew on Sunday morning, but the fire in their eyes when they serve on a mission team, or when they discover deep Christian friendship, or when they feel their lives drawing closer to God.

For any of that to happen, you need to reach them. You need to set aside the time for doing that work.

Wha do you give up in order to have communications time? Much church administration can be handed off to competent laity. So can some aspects of pastoral care and teaching. You will want to negotiate this with your lay council, so that they have your back. But be insistent: your congregation’s future lies in reaching people you don’t yet know. This is time consuming work, and in the present day, it is perhaps your most important work.
 

About the Author

Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the publisher of Fresh Day online magazine, author of On a Journey and two national newspaper columns. His website is Church Wellness – Morning Walk Media