Churches of Christ -- Sermons; Sermons, American -- 20th century
The arrangement of the program may look like a small item, but it’s one
of those little items, which, taken along with others, makes a big
difference. Reports and records of the treasurer and of other workers in
the church are important. Our attitude toward strangers when they visit
our meetings is significant. That’s one respect in which the Chapel
Avenue congregation is outstanding. Your courtesy to strangers has
caused much favorable comment.
6. _Advertising the work of the church._ I’ve known churches to spend
three or four hundred dollars to get a preacher, and refuse to spend $25
to get the people there to hear him. Think about that! You know the
preacher can’t do any good unless the people are there. I went to a
certain city in West Virginia to hold a meeting, and I wrote to them in
advance urging them to advertise the meeting. Well, I couldn’t say too
much, you know. They’d think I was trying to get them to advertise me.
After I arrived I asked them if they’d advertised the meeting. They
said, “Oh, yes.” I looked around for a sign but I didn’t see one. The
church building was located on a through highway that ran from the North
to the South. A streamer across the road would have attracted the
attention of everybody who passed. They hadn’t put one up. I looked in
the store windows and saw no ads. I saw none anywhere.
I decided to find out whether they had advertised the meeting. It was a
small town where everybody is supposed to know what everybody else is
doing anyway—only about 1,000 people. I went to the stores and inquired
whether a meeting was going on in town. In every store I entered I was
thoroughly informed about a Nazarene meeting. One fellow got so
enthusiastic that he took me out on the street and showed me the
preacher’s house and told me where they were holding the meeting. After
they would finish their story I’d always ask if there were any other
meetings going on in town. In each case the answer was, “No.”
In our meeting that night I related my experiment and its results. And I
said, “Now, don’t think I told those people any better. I thought I’d
help you keep the secret!” That’s the principle on which a great many
churches work.
Remember that you have not advertised the work of the church when you
merely let people know it’s going on. You haven’t advertised it until
you _make them want a part in it_! Everybody in this country knows that
the Standard Oil Company has gasoline for sale. If that were the end of
advertising, they could discontinue theirs. But that’s not the purpose
of it. Their purpose is to make people _want_ Standard gasoline, so they
keep on advertising. Too often we think we’ve advertised the church just
because people know it’s in existence, but we have not advertised it
until we make them want a part in it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account