Who Are You Serving?
Who are you serving? No business, ministry or nonprofit can be successful without serious reflection on answering this question. Without a clear answer, there’s a risk of wasting precious resources, struggling to set a clear vision and missing out on opportunities.
The same is true of churches. I know it probably sounds too “business-speak” to talk about “target audience” when thinking about churches…after all the Great Commission says to go into “all the world!”
But every church lives out their global mission in a specific context, a specific place. Not just that, but every church has both an internal and external audience. The internal audience is the congregation, the church family, the core community. Caring about this audience leads to questions about programming, spiritual growth and care for membership and retention, even interior design and other amenities like, “should we serve coffee before or after service?”
On the other end of the spectrum is the external audience which includes the community, the neighborhood, the city. Engaging this audience leads to questions about attracting new people to church, evangelizing non-believers and serving the needy.
Balancing Internal and External Audiences
How a church sees itself as it pertains to these two audiences will significantly shape its central decision-making processes. Churches that are more focused on the concerns of the internal audience will primarily think about change in terms of how it will affect the congregation and church community. This can put churches in a position of cultivating strong internal ties, but the risk here is creating an insular community that is disengaged with the needs of the surrounding community. Over time this can lead to stagnation and retrenchment.
On the other hand, churches that prioritize the external community in their decision-making may be deft at being more visible in the broader community and perhaps easily poised to readily connect with the unchurched or the needy. However, an overemphasis on serving the outsider can run the risk of weakening internal ties and bonds. Without a strong internal foundation, churches can easily get lost in the whims of the external audience, be spread too thin and lose mission focus.
Asking Better Questions
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be either-or. There are plenty of ways churches can position themselves to nurture both audiences. It’s all a matter of strategically reframing questions that take into account the needs and pain points of both internal and external audiences.
The key is to ask questions in a way that addresses internal needs while keeping the needs of the surrounding community in mind. Here are some examples of how this takes shape when considering your property.
Three Examples
If you’re a church that is running out of space and you have the budget to build an addition on the property, the questions that will guide the design process with your internal audience will start with: What kind of space do we need and what kind of space will the city let us build? But what if you expanded your design process to include your external audience? Then you might also ask: What kind of space does our neighborhood/city need? If you consider both audiences your design will take a different shape — perhaps developing some flexible and adaptable spaces that can be easily reconfigured to meet uses for different users throughout the week. Small shifts like these in the questions you ask can open up new pathways for community engagement (and even revenue!).
Or, maybe you’re a church that is running out of space, but your budget for building anything new is limited or non-existent. Instead of asking how do we contrive more multipurpose spaces with what we have (internal question), you could ask: what organizations and businesses do we know who may be willing to share space with us (external question)? Thinking about space as a community resource may open the doors to untapped opportunities for partnerships and connections that wouldn’t come to fruition if you were only focused on internal assets.
Or let’s say your church has parking needs. Instead of deciding to add more asphalt to your property, you might first survey your area to see if there are other parking lots or street parking nearby that could be better utilized and/or shared. Asking how you can find more parking without creating an empty lot for the rest of the week is a valuable question to raise with your external audience in mind. What would it look like to balance the parking needs of your congregation with what would bless the neighborhood? This might mean creating shared parking arrangements, offering a shuttle service, or designing your parking lot to be a basketball court, a food truck park, or a farmers market on days other than Sunday.
These are some examples of how to reframe questions that include both the needs of the congregation while also considering the needs of the community. They might seem like simple questions, but they represent a powerful mindset shift in how to think about property as a tool to use in the pursuit of a bigger mission, both for the life of the congregation and for the blessing of the neighborhood.