How Gifted can help your church grow this Christmas

You’ll find a huge number of resources, from a full worship service package to individual design assets. Our aim is to make planning your Advent and Christmas services and events as easy as possible, hopefully freeing up your time for mission and ministry in your local context.

Part of our Christmas activities includes a survey for feedback to ensure what we're producing is purposeful. One piece of feedback from local churches is needing to understand better how everything fits together, and what resources are for whom. It's not always obvious how paid social media advertising connects into local church attendance, so this explanation helps understanding of:

• Who we are talking to
• What message(s) we are trying to communicate with them
• Where this engagement might happen
• How we think this might move someone along a journey of exploring faith.

Gifted gives a three-step approach

Our three-step approach enables the Methodist Church to reach different people at different stages of faith, whether unfamiliar with Christianity, or committed disciples of Jesus. This approach helps us all understand the journey we hope people will take through Gifted this Christmas.

Gifted’s three steps are:

1. People are a gift – made by God with love
2. Church community is a gift to others – for inviting them in to be blessed
3. Jesus is the ultimate gift – given freely.

These steps offer a discipleship process: allowing the Church to speak appropriately with someone, dependent upon where they join us in the Gifted journey. They also help us know what to invite someone to engage with next on their faith journey. All good evangelism is invitational – so this approach helps us to plan appropriate invitations for people.

For example, someone new to a journey of faith, who might have had a poor experience with church in the past, may need language about being loved, being accepted and being seen – before they can recognise the gift of their local church and the ultimate gift we have in Jesus.

This process is not one-size-fits-all. There will be many situations and people we interact with who journey with us in a different way – BUT it gives us an idea of the most likely journey that someone might take with the Methodist Church this Christmas.

What’s the aim?

Our aim for Gifted’s three-step approach is to:

• gradually introduce someone to their local church, as we
• help them, firstly, find their worth
• and eventually discover the joy of church community and the wonderful love of Jesus.

We understand that, for a lot of people, this might be a long journey: They may have questions that local churches can help them explore, providing routes to unpack more of faith and what the Methodist Church has to offer.

That means the further someone journeys through Gifted, there are more opportunities for local churches to meet the needs of that person, encouraging them on their journey and speaking of Christ with them.

How do we define who we speak to, when?

Finding the right thing to say to the right person at the right time is sometimes the most difficult thing. That’s why we aim to understand where people are on our three-step journey – so they see the right kind of messaging and resources that encourage them to join the journey or make further progress along it.

Some groups of people might fall into several stages of the Gifted journey. And some people might be open to hearing a different message to others who have a similar background. That’s okay, every person’s story is different. But having these categories helps place a person on their journey and then introduces them to the right resource or information supporting them with their next step.

This process works best when we take time to consider each person’s journey: Where are they? Where did they come from? Where do we hope they will go next? What can we do to help?

How does this help local churches?

Our purposes for Gifted’s digital content (film, social media, Christmas-week emails, etc) are to help people understand something of the gospel, to join local churches, and so to come to faith in Jesus. Imagine this process as a funnel, guiding people into a closer relationship with their local church and all it has to offer for their faith journey. Methodists in local churches are the best people to journey with ‘newcomers’ as they explore faith. So our digital content seeks to change people’s perspectives, and ultimately to put them in touch with Methodists near them.

Step 1 Broad ‘marketing’ content

• Reaching out, mostly online, to as many people as possible.
• Digital and some print ads, film, web content, and word of mouth.

Step 1 is broad because we truly hope that anyone might join this journey, and then progress, via various routes, to find their way closer to a local church community, hearing more about Jesus.

Step 2 Community next steps

• Where local churches are engaging with their local community.
• New people who might have joined the Gifted journey at Step 1 are meeting local church folk.

While local church members are interacting at community level, if some people are not ready to engage with a local church just yet, other online resources and content will help take them own their steps along their Gifted journey.

Step 3 Local church engagement

• Someone following the Gifted journey will be discovering all that the Methodist Church has to offer – either digitally or by attending local church Christmas events.
• Gifted journey-ers will have heard about Jesus, and are perhaps ready to hear more.

By Step 3 local churches can grow their relationships with invitations further into the local Methodist church, introducing people to other helpful resources, and walking with them in their ongoing discipleship.

Is this all a pipedream?

It might seem unlikely to you that somebody who isn’t a Christian will respond positively to a social media advert from a church.

Well, last year the total number of people signing up for our Daily Christmas mindfulness moments was 5,480. We invited people on a next step journey to continue exploring faith from a Methodist perspective – with 3,387 clicking through from paid social media advertising and 'converting' to receiving to the Daily Christmas mindfulness moments emails. Simply after seeing a social media advert.

That means over 5,000 people took a step on a journey of faith as a result of a paid social media advert from the Methodist Church during Advent – so it does happen!

Our research and testing shows that people are more likely to respond to subtle religious messaging, and prefer to be introduced to religious concepts slowly as they build trust in the Church. That’s why we have this three-step process to remind us to move at the pace of trust with the people we engage online.

We pray in expectation that God will use Gifted for the Methodist Church, as well as all the mission and ministry of local Methodist churches everywhere, to reach new people with the gospel message this Christmas.