Targeting your audience in church planting

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:09

Hey, welcome to Unfiltered, the real church planning discussions. I'm Lee Stevenson and I have the privilege of serving as the national director of church planning for Converge. And here's my co host, Danny.

Danny Parmelee: 00:00:22

Danny Parmelee here from Converge Mid America. I work with church planters overseeing that region.

Lee Stephenson: 00:00:28

Awesome. We're excited to be with you today.

As we take some time, we want to discuss the idea of having a niche or a target audience when it comes to planting. Some people would come from the background going, no, you don't need a target audience. Because the reality is everybody's your audience.

All those that are far from Christ is who you're going after. Other people would say, absolutely, you should have a target. And the more specific that you have a target, the better it is.

So let's begin right off the bat, let's just kind of clear the air here. Danny, what do you think when it comes to target?

Should we have a target when it comes, you know, as you talk to church planters, coach church planters, what do you think? Should a planter have a target? And if so, why?

Danny Parmelee: 00:01:19

Yeah, I think targets are very important to identify. And it doesn't mean that you are exclusionary, it's just what your trying.

Of course you want every single person who doesn't have a relationship with Christ. And as people come to Christ, you want, you know, multi ethnic, multi generational, multi socioeconomic.

But as you make decisions, it's really important. If you don't have a specified target, you could actually be wasting a lot of resources.

So another thing for me the question is, is it biblical or not? Do we see in the Bible that the apostles or disciples make targets? And I would say absolutely. I mean, look at Paul.

He said, hey, I feel specifically called to the gentiles. So I'm going to go and I'm going to target gentiles. He put a strategy in place to specifically try to reach them.

Now, did he want Jewish people to come to know Christ? Absolutely. We see that bleed through as he's talking in Romans about how he would even give up his own salvation.

But when it came down to it, his strategy was based around his target audience, which was reaching the gentiles.

Lee Stephenson: 00:02:22

Okay, so you just say any audience, I mean, any planter that comes in needs a target. How specific do you think they need to be then with that target?

Danny Parmelee: 00:02:34

Well, I think that's, I think it's going to depend on really who they are and I guess who they're trying to reach that is their target. But let me Explain it in some examples, maybe even personal experience. So we are.

When Emily and I moved to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, we were in our mid-20s. And so we had to have a pretty realistic idea of who we were going to reach and who we weren't.

So for us to say, hey, well, we're going to target anybody just in the east side of Milwaukee, well, there were people there that were in their 60s and multimillionaires, and guess what?

They were probably outside of our target realistic audience of being, all right, you're going to attract college students, young professionals, married, even married, without children, simply because of who you were. Our target audience was in some ways even kind of dictated by who we were so that we could set up our strategy and make decisions.

You know, how we were going to do our marketing, the type of facility, the where we would have our facility based on those things.

Lee Stephenson: 00:03:44

Great, great. I would agree with Danny in this, in that you need to have a target.

And I'm going to come from one side of it here first and then kind of build it towards another side. Danny, when I sit down with planters, I like to just talk about the population in general.

And I think you can describe the entire United States population within four groups of people. You have atheists, I mean, believe absolutely there is no God. You have those that I would say are truth seekers.

So they're looking for an answer, they're looking for truth. They haven't come to the fact of knowing that Jesus is that answer, but they're out there and they're searching.

Some may think it's this, others will think it's this. They believe that yes, there is some truth, there's some absolute, they may call it God, they don't know the ins and outs of that.

They haven't crossed the line of faith in following Jesus. Then you have those that have crossed the line of faith in following Jesus. And I would call them practical Christians.

In other words, practical Christians are those that they're a Christian. Because right now, frankly, it's kind of working for me.

You know, like when the pastor, for instance, tells me I should pray with my wife, and I do, my marriage seems to go better. Or when I give a little bit of my finances, my finances seem to be doing better. And so practically it's like, well, it's working for me.

Why would I screw this up? And then your last would be what I would characterize as being self feeders.

They're those that have the ability to open up the Bible, read the Bible for themselves, and then practically Apply it to their lives without needing the guidance or the direction of somebody speaking. Constantly saying this is what you should do, this is what you should do.

What I find is a lot of pastors and even planters out there, they don't give this concept any thought really in the way that they program, the way that they put their services together, to how they establish their guest services, to the way that they preach. And the reality is that let's take the very best order in the world.

You cannot preach a 30 minute sermon to all four groups and do an adequate job of it. It's just impossible.

I don't care how good you are, you can't approach the self feeder and the atheist in the same sermon and expect that it's going to land for both of them.

And so I do think that there's people that God is uniquely called and gifted to go after one of those groups like there are churches out there where God has uniquely called. The pastors say, hey, I want you to reach this hard to reach area. You're going after the atheist.

And they know this is hard ground, this is not going to be easy territory to take, but they're committed to that. You have other ones that you know. I think God has said, hey man, I want you to kind of focus in on self feeders.

I do think practically speaking the two middle groups are the easiest two groups to reach.

There are enough similarities and the reality is a lot of people will self identify themselves as self feeders when practically they're actually operating as a practical Christian.

And the easier it is if you can distinguish those groups and figure out who God has called you to reach, you'll be that much better at actually accomplishing that target in how you encompass and create your entire ministry focus. You can preach to a truth seeker and a practical Christian very easily.

Now you don't ignore your self feeders, but your self eaters, remember, aren't reliant upon the church for their self being and their spiritual growth. They're owning that. And so you need to engage them to help you make disciples of the other two groups that it creates this continuous.

I think once you have that dichotomy zoned in, then you can begin to distinguish more specific groups or generational appeal within your community. What do you think about that?

Danny Parmelee: 00:07:51

No, absolutely. And I think too some of that will even depend regionally.

So having moved from the north to down south to see the amount of practical Christians and that there is a need for church plants, people say what you need more churches in The South. Yes, we do, because there are so many that are living in that practical sense that that will be a church.

Planters call and how they arrange their model and their strategy is based off of who they're trying to reach, which that wouldn't work to reach a non believer or to reach the academics, so to speak, on Harvard's campus type of thing. So. Absolutely. My question for you is that both of us here are saying, yep, identify target audience.

And some of that will include some of those other different demographic things. How do you avoid, though, going to unbiblical places that deal with segregation or marginalizing people?

Lee Stephenson: 00:08:52

I think, number one, you have to be intentional about it. I think you have to be cognizant of the community that God has placed you in. And I would hope that your church would reflect your community.

I think if you are in a very, like, let's say here in Orlando, where we're recording this, Orlando is a melting pot of culture. It's a very, very diverse city. Multiple languages. Part of it is the tourism attraction here.

But every time we go to the grocery store, you're hearing multiple languages spoken.

And so if you're planning a church here, you have to have a sensitivity to the culture of our city and make sure that the way that you program, even to the songs that you sing, have a greater appeal to the diversity. So that you have the feel of, we're a church of our city, you know, that we're not marginalized, we're not just targeted here.

You know, I think about revelation, the pictures that we get of what heaven's going to be like. And I think that is important.

If that is where you are and that is the community in which you live, you need to be intentional about making sure that you create the avenues to be able to reach that community. Now, if you're in a community that's not diverse, you can't make a diverse community out of something that's not diverse.

And so you have to be sensitive to those things, but you also have to understand the reality of where you live.

Danny Parmelee: 00:10:28

Right.

Lee Stephenson: 00:10:29

Anything that you would add to that?

Danny Parmelee: 00:10:30

Yeah, no.

I mean, I think it's always going to be a tension as the discussion of targeting, because again, like I said and like you said, just identifying who you're trying to reach, and especially from the spiritual standpoint, I don't think there's going to be or there shouldn't be a question there to be able to say like, okay, just trying to identify the type of people that we're trying to Reach and that it's not. You aren't making the argument, hey, you all have to choose this type.

It's figuring out because one church may be called to these people, another church called to these people, another one. But when we start talking about the different, you know, you start talking about race or socioeconomic.

And yet at the same time, I think that we'll see the disciples and the apostles, same thing. They're at least aware of these different dynamics as they're going into communities. And it does inform their strategies.

And I think that that's the biggest part of targeting, is because we have limited time, because we have limited resource, being able to focus on certain groups at the same time, of being intentional, that there's a representation of all people that are gathered there.

Lee Stephenson: 00:11:32

Yeah, no, I think that's good. And let me give a practical example. Where we were located, where we planted was in East Mesa, Arizona.

East Mesa is a very predominant Mormon Latter Day Saint culture. They run the school district, they run the local government. Second highest population of Mormons in the nation is in that area.

And so it had a very specific kind of culture of the city, but it was very well educated. Healthcare was a major driver of jobs. We had a desire to plant campuses and churches in communities that were further east of us.

And those communities were mining communities.

And in those mining communities, you would have communities of 10 and even the biggest mining communities of 20,000 people and no healthy church in the entire city or town. And that broke my heart.

But we knew the chances of us taking a person in our community or in our church even, and planting them or transplanting them in that community to plant a church would probably be very unsuccessful. We need a certain type of person and a certain type of experience level that could connect with those people at that level.

In other words, they had to speak the same language because we spoke different languages, even though they're, you know, we're in the same state, maybe an hour apart, right?

Danny Parmelee: 00:13:05

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think.

Let's talk a little bit about the importance of having a niche, so to speak, if we can jump there, and how that deals with target as well as you're planting a church and you're recognizing what kind of already exists within the community as far as reaching people. And if there's. How targeting can also help you to identify a group of people that may be slipping through the cracks.

Lee Stephenson: 00:13:33

I love it.

It's probably one of the things I'm most passionate about is when you're planning church, you need to understand, be a student of the community in which you're wanting to plant. And as you become a student of that, try to understand why God has called you to that community.

What is the need there that God has called you to specifically be able to fill that nobody else has is reaching.

And when it comes to that, trying to figure out that specific niche, number one, you have to ask yourself, what are the churches that are already there? What are they doing, what is working, what's not working?

And that'll begin to free up a framework to understand maybe God is calling us to fill the gap, but that nobody's paying attention to in this specific area.

The other piece of this is as a planter going in, most of us could take a vision statement from any church in America, plug it into ours, post it on the wall, and we'd be fine. So it's not the vision statement that's gonna make the difference. Same thing with our value statements.

I don't know of many churches in America that are evangelical churches that would say they don't value prayer or that they don't value generosity or they don't value servanthood, you know, and hospitality. Like every church in America probably could take the same value statement and plug it in, they'd be okay.

The thing that is going to make the difference is the culture in which you're creating the life of your church. And the culture is where you can create that unique niche.

You know, there are going to be a breadth of cultures of churches that are going to appeal to appeal to certain people the better that you know who you are and who you are not. And the culture that God has called you to reach and then the needs of your community, there's where you have a mission.

And I think God will really bless that.

Danny Parmelee: 00:15:28

Yeah, I think a lot of times when the discussion of target comes up, it can sound so business, so corporate, and yet I like to see it so much as missionary because it is, it's reading the culture, it's reading the community.

So I'd like us to even just run through maybe even a couple of practical examples so people are understanding the importance of this when you have to make decisions and how it informs decision making stuff and strategy.

So if you're realizing, I think for example, minors or we'll say, hey, you know what, there seems to be this lower to middle class of factory workers and you've got a great story. You grew up and your dad was a factory worker. You understand kind of that culture.

So you're going into this town, you're going into this community, everything of where you pick your location to, what time is the service. Okay, well, if you're knowing that factory workers may be working till the wee hours of the night to have an 8 o'clock service, just might not work.

Maybe you do pick one that's later in the afternoon or even evening if you're expecting them to dress up in their $100 suit. Not gonna. Or 200. Actually, I don't know how much a suit is. I don't even have one. But whatever those types.

So all of these different decisions or even kind of the flavor of ads that you would put all of that is run through that filter. Now again, if someone of great means wants to come to your church, praise God, that would be awesome.

But you're not catering to that and all those decisions are kind of run through it.

So I don't know if you have an example too, or if you want to take one of church planters that you've seen where it's like, hey, I really want to reach or young families specifically. And saying, yes, of course we want college students, we want older people.

But if you are saying you want to reach families, then describe to me some different things within both Sunday and how you structure small groups and all of that. That's also going to start.

Lee Stephenson: 00:17:31

Yeah, that's good. I think that again, this comes back to knowing who you and who you're not and really being a student in your community.

Because if you sit there and go, well, I'm a young family and I live in this community and you set out to meet young families, but your entire community is made of retirees, you're kind of killing yourself. You know, like here in Florida we have a community. Right now is the fastest growing city in the United States. It's called the Villages.

The Villages is a 55 and older community. Well, I can't even go in there and plant a church even if I wanted to, you know, and.

But the unique thing is if I'm planning a church there, I don't have to think about children's ministry. So some of you out there, you may be a perfect fit for declaring the villages and help us plant a church in the villages.

Not only that, I mean, I think about for us where we planted church, there are a lot of young families. And so with all the young families that are there, we knew that that was a natural fit because that's who we were.

And so it'd be a real easy connection for us to be able to connect the dots, connect relationally with Them our kids are playing sports together. But at the same time, our community did have a lot of retirees. Everybody you know, came from Wisconsin and Minnesota and landed in Arizona. Yeah.

To get away from the weather.

And we just had to realize we don't want to alienate them, but it's not a natural thing to make them our target audience because we just, we look at the world totally different. And so our natural niche was to go after those that saw the world like we did.

I was talking with a pastor of a very large church that took over this church when it was like 50 people and they're in a farming community, but just blowing out the doors and, and it really challenged me because we got talking on this subject and I said, how do you guys target because you have such a breadth. I mean you're in a farming community but you're running 14,000 people.

And he said, we made a decision several years ago that we wanted to go after the hardest demographic in the United States population. And he said the hardest demographic to reach for Christ was the 29 year old single male.

And so we now program everything we do, the music we choose, the way in which we preach, all those things are oriented. Would a 29 year old single male feel welcome here and could he engage with what we're doing? If not, we didn't do it. And that really was.

And it showed in everything that they did. Their paint schemes, the way the bathrooms were put together, the cafe.

Danny Parmelee: 00:20:15

So was it the one church that had better men's bathrooms than women's bathrooms?

Lee Stephenson: 00:20:19

It had very nice bathrooms, that was for sure. But you know, and I thought they understood their demographic, they understood their population and it was working for them in their scenario.

Danny Parmelee: 00:20:29

Yeah. So I'm going to share a little bit of some of the downside of targeting or if you're not careful, what can happen.

And this one comes from personal experience for us. So we set a pretty tight demographic in the sense of saying, hey, we wanted to reach college students and young professionals.

And well, we didn't say married with no kids, but that's essentially what we all were. Now the great thing is because we had such a focused target group, the church grew with just those people.

And then it was really hard to break out of that. And as people in the church had children because we didn't have others that had children, they ended up kind of leaving the church.

Or if new people came to the community and they heard positive things about the church, they would show up and they'd say, I don't Fit here. So it actually took a while to break out of that. When you had a few people with gray hair say, oh, I don't think that I fit here.

It's like, no, you don't understand. We really actually want you here. And there is so much value that you add. But it took them kind of taking that risk to kind of break out of that.

And then I would say the same thing racially as well, too.

We came in with the intention of being racially diverse, but because it kind of started off with just a predominantly, you know, white, urban type of demographic, it all sudden kind of like squeezed that out.

And it wasn't actually until we went multi site that we kind of ended back into a multicultural setting and of course, multi generational at that point too. That's right, yeah. So just.

Lee Stephenson: 00:22:06

Do you find it, the church naturally shifted like when you guys had kids?

Danny Parmelee: 00:22:12

Yes, absolutely.

Lee Stephenson: 00:22:13

It was easier to follow the change.

Danny Parmelee: 00:22:15

Yeah. And I mean, church planning 101 is good parking lots, children's move ministry, and nice bathrooms.

And we didn't have any of those when we started, especially the children's ministry. And I would say there's two things. One is we didn't get families and kids.

So when someone had a child and didn't want to bring them to our Saturday night or Sunday night 5:30 service, we thought, those people don't love Jesus as much as we do because we didn't have kids. We had no idea. And so I think that then once we had children, it's like, oh, now we get it. And to say, oh, just hire a babysitter.

Yeah, I really want to spend my money and leave my kids at home. It just didn't make a lot of sense. So anyways, for us, yeah, there was that shift at age 30 for us that all of a sudden it changed.

And then people started having kids and babies and stuck around because we started to orient ministry around it and understood it much better.

Lee Stephenson: 00:23:09

Yeah, that's great. So coming back on this, we both would kind of agree.

You need to have a niche, you need to have a target in the way that you approach reaching your community. There are plus sides, there are negative sides to that, but we believe that the bonus outweighs the negatives, really.

And I would encourage you a way in which you can begin to think through how to define your target audience is define who lives in your area. Just sit down with a piece of paper and begin to write it out.

Maybe you can pull from some of the census information that may be held on the local town website and begin to distinguish. You can look at who you are as a team and the diversity of your team.

And are we connecting the dots with the diversity of our community, both from a generational diversity, but even a racial diversity? And then begin to put together a value system. What do these group of people value?

And that will help you begin to whittle down and create a grid that will help you figure out how to reach that target audience that you feel God is uniquely positioned. You go after awesome. Well, thanks again for being with us.

This has been unfiltered and we've taken some time to talk about the importance of targeting when it comes to going after a specific niche or audience within your community. Thanks for being with us. Until next time, keep it real.