We’ve Tried That Before… Why Most Church Projects Fail (And How You Can Do It Differently)

I was recently sitting in a wood-paneled fellowship hall with the leadership team of an aging but faithful church. They were anxious. They knew they needed to connect with the young families moving into the new subdivision just a mile down the road, but every idea felt like a dead end. Finally, someone suggested hosting a summer movie night on the church lawn.

Immediately, an elder across the table crossed his arms, sighed, and said the four most paralyzing words in church leadership: “We've tried that before.” 

He went on to explain how, five years ago, they rented a giant inflatable screen, bought a popcorn machine, and plastered flyers all over town. On the night of the event, only three people from the neighborhood showed up.

Sometimes when I work with churches, I hear this age-old refrain, and it’s often true…. kind of.

Certainly, there isn’t necessarily anything new under the sun, and there are well-worn paths many churches have taken. But I always wonder if a deeper review of what has come before would reveal some missing steps in a church's project.

Taking a look at those missing steps might reveal a better way to go about ministry and a process that actually produces results. If you want to stop failing at community outreach, you have to stop skipping these four steps.

1. Get in touch with your superpower

You have something unique to offer. One church I worked with was feeling very insecure about its size and the downward trajectory of their attendance. I get it. That feels bad. But when I did an assessment with them, the number one thing I heard was, “These people are my family.” They talked about themselves like an extended family who are always there for each other over decades.

What they didn’t realize was that this could be their superpower. I asked them, “Don’t you think in a world with a loneliness epidemic, a dedicated extended family who will always be there for you might be exactly what people want?” That’s the way I personally look at church these days. I want what those people have. I want people like that in my life when I’m 70. 

Your church has a superpower, and you need to start with recognizing and embracing it before you can figure out what’s next. 

2. Let your community tell you what it needs

This is what I feel like most churches skip. They may think about what they have to offer and just start offering it. Or, more commonly, the church assumes what their community needs or wants, mostly through their own lens of desire, and starts there.

Inevitably, efforts come up short because the church didn’t really ASK its neighbors what they needed. But the truth is there are some specific issues, problems, or pressure points in your community that affect your neighbors. It might not be unique to your community, but it matters to your community. It might not be the only problem, but it IS a problem.

The key here is that the church needs to let the community tell it what it needs. That may be things like food for hungry kids on the weekends, or food for the homeless. But it also might be a centralized public space to hang out and connect with neighbors, more parking for local events, a local sports league so families don’t have to sign up for travel teams, or volunteers in the lunch rooms of the elementary schools.

If you are a church, don’t assume you have the answer until you’ve actually asked the questions.

3. In order to know the needs, you have to know the people

This is the hinge on which all ministry swings, in my opinion: people in the church need to have actual relationships with people outside the church. We often get stuck in a loop of what will attract others to show up to our church when the answer is very simple: people will go where their friends are. While it’s good to look at demographic data, do surveys to find needs, and conduct community interviews, the core of all of it is relationships.

Want more young families to start coming to your church? Ask yourself, “How many young families do our church members have relationships with?” Want to reach more college students? How many of them do people in your church know by name? Do you have a growing community with new people moving in? How have you met these new neighbors?

It’s simple, it’s straightforward, and yet, it’s the most overlooked part of the process. We make friends before we grow our church. Now, of course, there are plenty of stories of churches who put on the big event and grew their church, but that’s a rarity and not a sustainable solution. Go ahead and put on the event, but do so once everyone in the church has people they know that they can invite.

We had this show up in my own church. Every year we threw a party for the kids in our community over Halloween. Lots of games, food, candy, and fun. It was great. We routinely had hundreds of people show up, our volunteers did a great job, and we loved the connection to the community.

But over time we realized that people who were coming to the event weren’t connected at all to the people putting on the event. There weren’t relationships, and the demographics were even very different. We realized that, outside the event, we didn’t have a way to connect them well to our church’s ministry. So we stopped. Instead, we focused on smaller gatherings, like a women’s event or a men’s event, that our people could easily invite friends and neighbors to.

Our stats went down. Our outreach events were much smaller. But the relationship-centric approach actually made a difference as more families visited and connected with our church because of the initial invite to the event.

4. Think experimentally

Finally, one overlooked aspect of making your efforts successful is to think experimentally.

I was with a church this spring, and we were dreaming up some experiments that would help us connect with the college students next door, as well as some of the nearby retirement community. We brainstormed lots of ideas and came up with an intergenerational event to teach some life skills. The elderly neighbors could offer expertise to college students on how to cook meals, repair their car, or balance their budgets. It was a great idea for an experiment.

Then we sent the idea to a committee.

There it became a massive “adopt-a-grandparent” program where they would start at the event, get matched up, and have relationships for the whole semester communicating and praying for one another.

But that felt like the cart way before the horse. We actually didn’t know that our target audience wanted that kind of relationship. I needed to remind them to take ministry one step at a time and that we wanted to start with a single event around intergenerational learning. That was the experiment. From there we hoped we’d learn a few things: the names of people we want to reach, and more about what those people wanted or needed.

That’s it. That’s all we needed to do before we determined the next step. But we started doing what we often do… assumed ALL of the next steps.

It would be wise for the church to not only conduct ministry experiments but be satisfied with the experiment. Those short-term, no-need-for-it-to-go-on-forever opportunities are there to help us learn. If the event fails and no one shows, we learned something. If it succeeds and we make the connections, we learn something.

Don’t move past the experiment. Don’t feel the need to set yourself up for failure by plotting the entire course, just take the next step and allow the relationships to guide you from there.

Conclusion: Waiting to be Reimagined

Your church has something to offer, and it might surprise you that if you embrace your superpower, it might actually meet the needs of the people you want to reach. But only if you’ve done the relational work to help make the connection and take the experimental steps forward to know what will work, and what won’t.

I don’t think the church is failing. I think it’s waiting to be reimagined. We are stepping into an era that invites us to new ways of thinking, experimenting, and changing. While stepping off the old map might feel threatening, signaling a "death" to the old, I believe embracing these changes will actually usher in a surprising and exciting vibrancy for the church. By investing in ministry experiments born out of actual relationships with our neighborhood, we might be able to let go of the need to get people to show up.  We might be able to stop asking people to let us serve them, and start actually serving them.

Next Steps

Ready to step off the old map? Here are a few practical ways to begin:

• Take a Superpower Inventory: Gather your team this week and ask, "What is the one thing our congregation does better than anything else?" Don't list programs; look for the character and culture of your people.

• Start One Conversation: Before launching your next community project, challenge your leadership team to sit down for dinner or coffee with a neighbor to simply listen. Ask them what their greatest struggles are right now.

• Design a Micro-Experiment: Take one idea and strip it of all long-term commitments. Run it once, keep the budget low, and view it entirely as a tool to learn names and hear needs.

• Rethink Your Metrics: For more resources on how to navigate change and measure the things that matter, visit scottpontier.org and download the New Ministry Dashboard.

If there’s anything I can do to help you take these next steps, just reach out: Scott.Pontier@ministryarchitects.com