God's Calling
When the telephone rang at the home of a Florida couple, they didn't hang up on the pre-recorded voice. They listened as they were guided through a survey about their interest in a local church. The timing of the phone call found them in the middle of a difficult passage in their marriage. The idea of attending a local church was appealing. A call from a church member was appealing.
Jon Domeij of The Broadcast Team, a direct marketing firm in Ormond Beach, Fla., and a church member, helped with the follow-up from the telephone survey program, called God's Calling, the church used to identify prospects.
"The situations we came across were just incredible," he said. He met the couple struggling in marriage. Domeij said he and his wife, "were able to listen and share with them about how our church has helped us in our growth with the Lord and the type of church we are." He invited the couple to worship. They came. They became very involved. "They're growing in Christ," Domeij said. "They said God's Calling saved their marriage."
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One of the appeals of the program for churches and church leaders is the speed and efficiency with which it can deliver hearts open to change, people interested in church fellowship.
Win Green, pastor of Everglades Community Church in Pembroke Pines, Fla., used God's Calling about two years ago. He said the service provided a high-tech solution to the volunteer and staff time and effort of cold calling.
"It gave us the opportunity to speak to people who were really looking for a church," Green said.
That personal contact is important, according to Green and Domeij.
"When you get this personal opportunity to invite someone to church, they feel they already have a friend there," Domeij said.
Domeij also touted the efficiency of the service. "We can reach so many people so quickly," Domeij said. The system can make as many as 3 million phone calls a day, 160,000 messages an hour.
In a recent test project, God's Calling telephoned about 13,000 phone numbers. They represented households in the four zip codes around the Covenant United Methodist Church in Port Orange, Fla.
In two and a half hours the system made 4,400 live connections. Out of those 213 people opted to participate in a brief survey on church interest. Out of those, 17 became qualified prospects for the church, indicating they wanted contact, 12 of those attended and several eventually became active members.
The results differed somewhat for Green's church. While there were visitors to the church out of the 10 prospects culled from the telephone survey, none ended up becoming church members. "It's a hit or miss affair," Green said.
Domeij said there are many factors that influence people to join a church. Sometimes something as simple as distance from the church is a deciding factor. In other cases church membership depends on receptivity.
The Rainer Scale
In developing the ministry, Domeij said they found different degrees of receptiveness that correlated with what he later found to be the Rainer Scale of Faith Stages, a rating of unchurched people by researcher and author Thom S. Rainer:
U1 - highly receptive to hearing and believing the Good News
U2 - Receptive to the gospel and church
U3 - Neutral, with no clear signs of being interested yet perhaps open to discussion
U4 - Resistant to the gospel, but with no antagonistic attitude
U5 - Highly antagonistic and even hostile to the gospel
"It appears that we encountered the entire scale of U1s to U5s," Domeij said. He said responses varied, even among those who expressed an interest in more information or contact from a local church.
Churches across the country have used God's Calling and other pre-recorded messaging programs from The Broadcast Team. They use telephone recordings to market an event, to alert members of service cancellations or to personally invite people to church.
One pastor's message is: "Hi, this is Mike. I'm a pastor at Lighthouse, a new church in our community. Yea, I know it sounds strange, a pastor calling people on the phone, but hey, how will you feel welcome at our church if I don't invite you?
I think you'll enjoy what's going on here. This Sunday I'll be talking about how to bring our dreams and aspirations into our everyday life plans.
We're really a friendly, low pressure kind of church, you know where we can all just be ourselves. So I want to invite you to the 10 o'clock service this Sunday. For directions to our church, call me at … ."
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The lines are open
According to BreakthroughChurch.com, both research and proven outreach programs consistently reveal that for every 20,000 homes within a 30-minute drive of a church, more than 200 people, in any three to four month period, are either casually or actively looking for a church.
The Dataman Group, providers of direct mail and telemarketing lists, reports that not only is the telephone still the No. 1 sales tool for marketing products and services, it is the church's single best tool for reaching out to new prospects.
"The telephone is a fabulous way for churches to outreach," said Dataman president, Dale Filhaber. Her Boca Raton, Fla., company provides direct marketing and telemarketing lists. "There are a lot of really personal touches that can happen." Filhaber said that with a phone call a church can have "a face."
Churches who use Dataman services purchase lists only. They rely on volunteers from their congregation to make the calls. A popular list from Dataman is a newcomer list of people new to the area. "That's one very important list we offer," said Filhaber.
"If there's a person who can really talk to a newcomer, they can share experiences. A volunteer is a wonderful thing. They can even set up a time to meet, something you can't do with an outside company or in some automated way."
The lists from Dataman have been popular with various churches across the U.S. "We have a lot of churches as our clients and have for 20 years," said Filhaber. In total, about 200 churches receive data from Dataman.
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The service has a personal touch as well as something else churches seem to like - it's cheap.
For about $50 a church can obtain an updated list each month of area newcomers. Usually there are 250 to 300 names. "You always have a list of prospects," Filhaber said.
The God's Calling service is also relatively inexpensive, 15 cents per message, but the company generally works with larger clients, such as the Promise Keepers ministry, to deliver thousands of messages. So they may charge $500 minimum per project.
That put the service out of reach for Green's church, he said. They continue to rely on road signs, direct mail, newspaper ads and service evangelism projects for community outreach.
"The most effective thing is to equip your active participants with evangelism skills," Green said. But he also said that God's Calling was "a good service," and that using the telephone for outreach is "very legitimate."
Filhaber said most churches she serves work the telephone number list fee into their budget. She said reaching out to new neighbors is a cornerstone of church marketing and should be done constantly. She characterized the calls as a friendly welcome from a neighborhood church. Churches also buy lists to market pre-Easter and pre-Christmas, or to market programs to families with children. Filhaber said the new baby list the company offers has been popular for churches interested in outreach to new parents.
"This is outreach," Filhaber said. "When people move into a new area they need to know so many things. The church offers entré to an entire community."
