Church outreach efforts are some of the best ways to reach your neighbors for the Gospel and transform your community without ever leaving home.
While every believer may not be called to live on the mission field, we are all called to be missionaries right where God has placed us. And that means making every effort to share the Good News with the people around you through your outreach.
But despite your best attempt, sometimes your outreach just isn’t working. If that happens, you may be left wondering what you did wrong, especially if you feel you’ve put in everything you could to make it a success.
The good news is that even if you’ve fallen victim to one of these outreach pitfalls, they’re easily fixable, so you can see the life-changing impact next time.
#1: You Fail to Follow Up
Planting seeds in your community is a great idea. But even an average gardener knows that nothing will grow if the seeds aren’t tended continually.
Sharing the Gospel with dozens of people at your Fourth of July community picnic is great, but if you don’t follow up with those connections, those people will struggle to grow into mature disciples equipped to make disciples.
For successful outreach, it is essential to have a plan in place beforehand to follow up with each genuine connection.
Just as a gardener would provide water regularly, ensure adequate sunlight, and prevent pests from causing harm, if you want to see the seeds of your outreach grow, you have to be intentional.
While it is true that only the Master Gardener knows if a seed will grow to bear good fruit, He does charge His followers with participating in the care and maintenance of each one.
Effective follow-up after an outreach program or event is just as important as the connections themselves. Those connections need to know that they matter in the long run and that your ministry wants to accompany them on their faith journey.
If you fail to follow up after an outreach effort, that may be a big reason why your outreach isn’t working.
#2: You Aren’t Actually Connecting
If you have dozens of volunteers on site for your outreach event, but they spend more time socializing with each other than connecting with new people, then you don’t have an outreach event. You have a church gathering that some community members attended.
It’s easy to think that you’re making connections and building relationships with people during your outreach programs, especially when you have plenty of church members on hand to make everything a success.
But part of successful outreach is training your volunteers how to connect with people and what is expected of them during their service.
If you find that your outreach isn’t building relationships and that you aren’t making as big an impact as you thought your efforts should be, it’s possible that you aren’t actually connecting.
Sharing the Gospel becomes significantly easier when you have a preexisting relationship with the person you’re trying to share with. And many of those relationships begin with connecting during an outreach event.
With the importance of making connections, it’s absolutely vital that you train your volunteers on how to do this and continually evaluate to ensure it’s happening.
It doesn’t matter how many people you have in attendance if you’re missing the opportunity to introduce them to Jesus.
#3: You’re Prioritizing the Wrong Things
Having beautiful decorations, amazing food, and dozens of fun activities are all good things, but if you aren’t prioritizing the right things for outreach, you’ll struggle to see success.
The main things you should focus on are training your volunteers to build genuine connections and share the Gospel with the people they encounter, having a solid follow-up plan, and finding ways to meet people where they are so that doors can be opened for Gospel conversations.
Everything else is secondary. The other things may help you accomplish your outreach priorities, but they shouldn’t be your primary focus.
The whole point of outreach is to meet the needs of your community and introduce them to the Savior of the world.
If you feel like you aren’t having any luck really connecting with people, it’s possible you’re putting too much emphasis on the wrong things.
Review your priority list as you plan your next event. Ensure that the areas where you’re dedicating resources and manpower are the right ones that will help you achieve the ultimate goals of the outreach effort. As long as those important things are covered, you can allocate as much or as little toward the secondary things as your ministry desires.
Outreach is already a challenging area of ministry to evaluate in terms of success. Planting the seeds of the Good News while meeting the needs of the people around you isn’t always a tangible thing you can measure.
However, if you find that your outreach efforts continually fall short of what you think they should be achieving, take the time to check for these three common pitfalls. Your outreach programs may not have been successful up to this point, but you can easily remedy these things and see the life-changing results you long to see in your community.
