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Featured Articles:
   Green is the thing!
   Spiritual Rags to Holy Riches - One Church's Journey to Shiloh             
   Marketing Matters - Step Two in the Marketing Process           

Green is the Thing!                (Graph of Roof Garden Soil Layers Below Article)
                                                                                                                         

Imagine a healing garden on the top of your house of worship. How about a special place for prayer and reflection?

Everyone seems to be thinking green these days as concern grows for global warming and other facets of our environment. Houses of worship are no exception.  Many have environmental committees or do environment related community work.  But beyond that, green can be both practical and beautiful.

If your house of worship is planning new construction or an addition, you might think of installing an environmentally compelling “Green Roof” system in place of where your shingles might be. 

The green roof system would be less applicable for a steeply pitched roof, but for those areas where the pitch is less pronounced or even flat, the green roof might be a viable alternative to traditional roofing materials.

A green roof is a roofing system which allows you grow a garden on your roof.  Yes, your house of God might just be sprouting flowers and other verdant material. Green roofs have been installed all over the world but have just really started catching the public eye, in America, in the last few years or so.

Green roofs (often more like green gardens), have been installed in public libraries, world trade centers, and storage facilities.  Harvard has green roofs for its graduate housing.  The Four Seasons Hotel has a lovely rooftop garden for its guests. There is a restaurant that grows its fresh herbs in a rooftop herb garden. There is even a green roof putting range.

Green roofs are great for a whole variety of reasons. They can:

• Reduce water runoff
• Insulate against sound and weather extremes.
• Serve serious functions like growing food and providing park-like spaces.
• Last longer than conventional roofs
• Require little or no maintenance
• Are beautiful
• Expand your facility by expanding the use of current space

They are only slightly pricier to install and result in long term cost savings.  The nonprofit organization which promotes green roofs has a cost calculator on their website at www.greenroofs.org.

So go ahead and imagine that little healing garden on your rooftop, or perhaps a special place for meditation and reflection.  Green might just be the answer to your prayers.

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Spiritual Rags to Holy Riches -
One Church's Journey to Shiloh

Every month Wardergroup features an article about one of the churches we helped with their new construction/addition project.  This month’s story is about Beltway Church of Christ, whose outreach program reaches international proportions.  

When Minister Varner Webb came to Beltway Church of Christ in the year 2000, the place was, as he puts it, “in shambles”.  It had been discovered that the property they had purchased for their new spiritual home had been a landfill and was filled with tires, washers, lumber and other debris. The cost to haul off the debris and bring in suitable soils, (controlled fill), for the almost 10 acre site, ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars. *

In addition, the church had split, with part of the congregation leaving to go with their past minister from a couple of years back.

Minister Webb’s mission was to enter the chaos and “calm the storm” by preaching healing and reconciliation.  His repeated message was, “Don’t point fingers, lets hold hands.” He built a leadership team with the elders and deacons who held fast while the boat was rocking. The team worked together to help the congregation get past the hurt and move on with its ministry.

Now the church is alive and vibrant. 

Minister Webb did not tell how many members had left before he came on board, nor does he say how many members they have grown by since his coming there.  He doesn’t want to know because, according to Minister Webb, “I don’t count members, I make each member count.”

None-the-less, the story is a successful one.  The church membership has grown, they are at peace, they are in the process of paying off their new construction debt and are now looking forward to the next two phases of their congregational life; the creation of a day care facility and, a little further down the road, the construction of a seniors home.

Lots of children play superhero, play house or play sports.  As a child, Minister Webb played minister. After being tutored by an older cousin, the young 15 year old began preaching for real. In fact, he preached for eight years before going to South Western Christian College, to study theology. But his ministry of reconciliation and love is the result of years of learning and wisdom.  The congregation of Beltway Church has the benefit.

Beltway’s interest in creating a preschool and senior’s facility comes from a dual impetus. “A church is not much to a community if it is not for a community,” says Minister Webb.  “Both working parents and the elderly are in real need of help, not just in the church population but also in the community at large. Most church bodies have some way of giving back.  The Baptists, for instance, have hospitals.  One church cannot administer to every need.  Our focus is on helping those aging in our community who cannot live alone and have nowhere else to go.” 

Marketing Matters for Growth and Vitality

This article is about your prospective customer; i.e. the worshiping community who are not currently attending your house of worship.

There are a number of ways that people describe the difference between sales and marketing.  My favorite is to say that sales is about the product and marketing is about the customer.  A salesperson will point to the product and all its many features and virtues.  A marketer will take a close, hard look at the customer and point to ways that the product will fill the customer’s needs. 

Ideally, sales and marketing would be combined into one interactive and co-influential effort. 

When we took a hard look at your focus, we were taking a look at you, the product.  Now it is time to fully examine the worship community outside your congregation and to whom you might want to direct your attention.

Are you striving for integration?  Look closely at those you wish to bring into your community.  What socioeconomic group do they belong to?   Where do these people live? What are their basic needs and values?  What environment do they feel the most comfortable with?  What images, colors and styles do they respond to?

Are you hoping to attract people of like kind or kindred spirit?  That is a little easier because you can look to yourself as a community to know how to base your appeal. 

Are you hoping to influence the age make up of your congregation?  In that case you would certainly not create a marketing strategy that would work with your current age demographic. 

So the second step in developing a marketing strategy is:

Too often the research needed to fully answer this question goes undone.  Too often people think that other people want what they themselves want, and formulate a strategy that would work for them, thinking that it would work for everyone else too. 

I remember back in my radio days that the death of a station was when an owner programmed the station to play music he, himself, liked thinking that everyone must like that music too. 

Business owners often sell to their customers with techniques that they, themselves, would respond to.

Husbands and wives often show their affection for one another in ways that have little meaning for their partner, but would have a great deal of meaning for them. 

In the case of marketing, we are throwing the golden rule out the window. In marketing, we want to do unto others the way they would want you to do unto them. Thorough research is the way to fully explore what that might be.