Evangelism Team Meeting
May 18, 2004

Attending: David Ashby, Dean Conklin, Dee Duncan, Lynda Fickling, Ken Fong (taking minutes), Janet Forbes, Laura Kuhl (presiding), Jerry McLeland (scribing on board). 

A number of changes to the last meeting’s minutes were noted; they will be re-issued. 

The team ranked the SWOT items from the last meeting in terms of impact and time / resources needed to implement them.   

The items are:

A) Members Not Evangelizing (Ken)

1.         Church member training

- Handouts

- Discussions

2.         Recruiting ET members

3.         Sensitizing church members to needs of other church members 

B) Visitor Followup (Dee, Lynda)

4.         A team to help Lynda with visitor followup by mail/email

5.         A team to help Lynda with visitor followup by phone (not just first time visitors)

6.         A team to help Lynda with home visits to those who have visited more than 3 times, those who have not attended in a while, etc.

7.         Make more effective use of visitor registration cards

8.         Develop standard materials to hand out to visitors

9.         Develop a visitor contact process 

C) Welcoming Atmosphere (Jim, Laura)

10.       Staff a visitor center

11.       Identify those who only attend Sunday worship services and get them more involved

12.       Provide participation opportunities

13.       Provide additional publicity for St. Luke’s presence

14.       Special mingling events (e.g., South Dakota day)

15.       Hospitality Team, including for external events

16.       Signage

17.       Providing adequate visitor parking

18.       Name tag attendant and policing

19.       Update the bulletin format 

Comments on the items during the ranking included:

1.         This item is not meant to include training as part of the initial resource estimate; we can do training over time more subtly in Sunday services.

3.         Focus is on creating awareness, not creating programs

4.         Lynda doesn’t need help for this item; mail/email contact is working fine with just Lynda and Bonnie.

5.         Lynda needs a team of six to 12.

11.       We linked this to item #5.

18.       Janet will help on this from the pulpit.

19.       Janet will take this item and look at the bulletin “with fresh eyes” while she is new. 

The resulting matrix is: 

Hi Time	7, 16, 17, 18	6, 10, 12, 15
	14	1, 2, 3, 5/11, 8, 9, 13, 18
Low Time	Low Impact	High Impact

 

(Items 4 and 19 are not included in this matrix, per the discussion above.) 

We then combined the High Impact/Low Time items into three groups and agreed on teams to work on them: 

1, 2, 3           “Members not evangelizing”            David, Ken, Jerry

5/11, 8, 9      “Visitor followup”                           Dee, Lynda

13, 18           “Welcoming atmosphere”                Dean, Laura 

ET members not at the meeting are invited to join these teams, of course. 

The three teams above will generate SMART goals to review at our next meeting. 

After some discussion, Ken and Dee agreed to start a discussion with the Ministry Council (at their 5/24 meeting) and Finance Committee on how we might spend the $25K evangelism budget.  We felt we should not spend in a piecemeal fashion and had to put together a “big picture” spending framework, even though we have not completed all our planning.  The framework needs to include the results to be achieved and funding for any external resources. 

We reviewed a number of possibilities for external resources that could help our work, including conferences, bringing training to St. Luke’s, subscribing to external services, etc.  We will discuss this further and decide at our next meeting which to pursue further. 

Laura also discussed some of the feedback from Fred Venable’s class on Borg’s “The Heart of Christianity,” since the class attendees’ thinking is useful input to our work. 

Our next meeting will be on June 8 at 7 PM.  Agenda items will include new SWOTs, budget, where we should use our identity statement in addition to evangelism, and of course the SMART goals from the three teams. 

Action Items:

Everyone:            The three teams present their SMART goals at the 6/8 meeting; if not a member of one of the teams, please join one.

Ken and Dee:      Begin budget discussions with the Ministry Council and Finance