Church is far more, as we as Christians know, than just attending church on a Sunday morning, but for those churches that have regular non-Christian visitors, a large base of new or young Christians, or many members who attend church because they have been brought up in church culture but have never actually made a commitment to Christ themselves, then getting the wider message of the Gospel understood can be a difficult task.
So the question is, how many of those attending your church on a Sunday morning are actually engaged with the church on a regular basis and share in the vision that your church has been called to pursue?
iKnow, whilst it is a church database system, it provides so much more than that. The system is developed by Christians whose hearts are for the Church to be on mission together, full steam for God and this means getting the whole church active and involved, rather than a handful of people doing everything.
There are several ways that iKnow can help you in mobilising your church together:
Pastoral alerts for weekly fellowship
On the ground level of church life, iKnow provides you with a system of making sure that each weekly small group is at a healthy level. Whilst someone has attended regularly over the last 3 months, do you remember if they have been attending 99% of the time each week over the past year, or have they only attended 30% of the time? iKnow can provide group leaders with the information they need to know each individual's attendance, so if someone doesn’t regularly commit to fellowship then leaders can be prompted to find out if everything is alright.
As a church leader, statistics of each small group will feed into the Metrics module so leaders can see the year-on-year health of the groups.
Target your communications correctly
The database in iKnow is built with member integration in mind and so your database becomes far more than just a storage system, you can harness its full potential to really make your church thrive. Utilise iKnow to find all those people in church who have been attending for a considerable amount of time but are not yet serving, or you may want to find those who are serving, in a weekly group and active in every way but have not yet been baptised - using the Finder Module you can create really detailed searches from the database to find the people in church who may otherwise have been not been picked up on in regards to pastoral care.
By creating searches like this, you can accurately target your communications to get the most relevant message to those people, because not everyone seeking baptism, for example, will be doing so from the same starting point in life. If you don’t know the person you are communicating with then you can’t create a clear message that really spurs them into the commission of the church.
Tapping into God given resources
Most churches will have the typical serving teams to help in various areas on a Sunday morning but our God cares for needs we don’t even know we have yet. He knows ahead of time if you are going to need a particular skill set for a particular project that you are working on and will always put the resources you need within reach. Being human however, we can often neglect to see what God is providing as we go off in our own efforts.
iKnow can help you in finding the people that God has placed around you. Just as iKnow groups together typical serving teams to help you communicate with them, you can also easily find those in the church with certain skill sets or knowledge, for example, all of the creative people in the church, or those who could possibly help in regards to business abilities and so forth.
To do this, you can set up ‘Circles’ - these are groupings of people who you need easy access to but they do not require a serving rota and they don’t meet as a traditional small group, but iKnow groups them together for you to be able to quickly contact.
If you need help with any of the areas covered in this articles or would like further advice and suggestions on how iKnow can help the church to foster a place of deep engagement, then our team are here to help.
Give us a call on 0121 651 1125 or you can email us on hello@iknowchurch.co.uk