Seven weeks ago I wrote this blog post about how Stetson Baptist Church used Text-to-Church to get people to sign up to invite friends back to Church. It was part of pastor Dan Glenn's sermon series on the Power of Routines. I promised a follow up when the series was over. Here is the note I got back from Dan. I think you'll agree that the results were incredible and I hope their creative use of Churchteams technology will encourage and inspire you.
Thanks for the follow up. Pretty crazy stuff happened. I am really pleased with the results and the opportunities to use Churchteams workflows and texting systems to offer practical application steps for each message. Here are the results…
On the week that we emphasized Reading the Bible, we had 567 adults and teenagers attend the service. We had 300 (yes, you read that right) take the challenge to read the bible reading plan. That reading plan lasted a week and we had great engagement with it. We also included a step in the workflow 30 days later encouraging people to re-engage in reading the Bible if they had fallen off in that month.
On the week that we emphasized Prayer, we sent out daily prayer prompts based on the Lord’s Prayer. 574 adults and teenagers attended the service. 253 engaged in the prayer guide workflow.
Here’s the one that surprised me. On the week that we emphasized fasting, we challenged people to do a 24 hour fast (dinner one night to dinner the next night). Fasting is not something that we talk about a lot in our church or denomination. We encouraged people to register for a two-day period in which we would send them encouraging methods over the course of the 24 hour period that they chose (Sunday/Monday, Monday/Tuesday, etc…) We had 575 in attendance and we had 169 engage in the fasting journey. I was OVERWHELMED at that response.
Finally, on the week we talked about generosity, we put together a series of inspiring Youtube videos that told stories of people expressing generosity. The sermon this week was very vision driven as we were celebrating the end of a 2-year giving campaign. We’re also gearing up for a year-end giving campaign. That said, the sermon was focused on a LOT of things, so we didn’t do a great job of promoting the text opportunity. When all was said and done, there were 581 in attendance and 112 took advantage of the workflow.
The last two weeks of the series (Sharing your Faith and Practicing Community) were much more organic and we did not do a workflow for those weeks.
All in all, it was a great series and we had some wonderful engagement from people along the way. I can’t wait to follow up and talk to you about what God did and how the partnership with Churchteams was so helpful!!
