A Personal Message from Tom Ehrich

Welcome to The Multichannel Church!

This web site is about concepts, best practices, tools and fresh content. 
As with our companion Church Wellness Project, we have no doctrinal or denominational axes to grind. Our only concern is to help congregations be healthy, effective, and transformative.  
This is a critically important moment for Christianity in America, especially in the mainline Protestant traditions. Churches have unparalleled opportunities and dangers, all at once. This isn't a time for "steady on course." It is a time to claim the future, or to accept non-viability within two to five years. 
Like many who care about faith communities, I have been grappling with the steady decline of mainline Protestant churches over the past 45 years and trying to understand what it means and what we can do about it. 
After much study, I see that the problem isn't what we do on Sunday or who does it. The problem is Sunday itself and how that one day claims our best resources and energies in a world where the Sunday-morning-church paradigm simply has shrinking appeal.  
Attendance and membership have been declining since 1964, when Baby Boomers began leaving home and their parents drifted away from church. Giving has lagged, too, and now compensating factors like endowments, deep-pocket givers and deferred maintenance have evaporated. 
In those years -- and the four recession-recovery cycles they encompass -- many churches made important changes in outdated liturgies, archaic distributions of power, leadership training and church facilities. Others resisted those changes. Either way, it made little difference in terms of congregational health factors such as giving, participation, membership, handling conflict and maintaining infrastructure. 
Recession or recovery, change or no-change, the grinding loss of membership and vitality continued unabated.  
I think it's time we saw that the world has changed, and what we know how to do -- Sunday liturgies, capable preaching, Sunday ministries of teaching and welcoming -- stopped being enough many years ago. 
In drifting away from church, you see, people aren't saying No to God or to faith. They are saying No to Sunday church. 
They do so for a variety of reasons. For some two-income families and hard-charging young adults, Sunday is the one day to get a slow start. Audience-style worship is too passive for a Web 2.0 world that is customer-centric and transactional. 
Even though modernized, the language of Sunday worship seems formulaic, anachronistic, too laden with denominational agenda. Decades of public bickering over sexuality, gender and doctrine have made some people wary. Public perceptions of Sunday church as a closed circle populated by smug, opinionated and older people haven't built bridges to young seekers. Over-involvement in partisan politics has hurt.
It's no one thing. Taken together, however, the many Nos to Sunday church add up to empty pews on Sunday morning and empty coffers. 
As increasingly desperate church leaders appeal to constituents' loyalty -- come on Sunday, pay for Sunday-focused staff and Sunday-justified facilities -- they discover one more No: many believers have found that faith has little to do with keeping institutions afloat. 
Instead, people are redirecting their faith-related activities, loyalties and dollars into a better "value proposition" than Sunday church alone can offer, namely, a dynamic mix of self-selected and self-directed opportunities for working out one's own faith. 
Many congregations saw the paradigm shifting and expanded their weekday, off-site and on-line ministries. Some have been extraordinarily successful in diversifying their ways of reaching people. An entrepreneurial spirit has yielded nimble responses to changing markets. 
The "Multichannel Church" is based on a fundamental known as "multichannel marketing," which uses many different channels to reach customers, such as retail store, catalog, web site, e-mail marketing. 
The Multichannel Church starts by affirming what it already knows how to do: provide Sunday ministries at a single site. Then the Multichannel Church adds more avenues of ministry, in an effort to reach more people.
Click here to read an Overview of how a Multichannel Church functions.
Again, welcome! 
Tom

This section of the web site is about concepts, best practices, tools and fresh content. 

As with our companion Church Wellness Project, we have no doctrinal or denominational axes to grind. Our only concern is to help congregations be healthy, effective, and transformative.  Tom1

This is a critically important moment for Christianity in America, especially in the mainline Protestant traditions. Churches have unparalleled opportunities and dangers, all at once. This isn't a time for "steady on course." It is a time to claim the future, or to accept non-viability within two to five years. 

Like many who care about faith communities, I have been grappling with the steady decline of mainline Protestant churches over the past 45 years and trying to understand what it means and what we can do about it. 

After much study, I see that the problem isn't what we do on Sunday or who does it. The problem is Sunday itself and how that one day claims our best resources and energies in a world where the Sunday-morning-church paradigm simply has shrinking appeal.  

Attendance and membership have been declining since 1964, when Baby Boomers began leaving home and their parents drifted away from church. Giving has lagged, too, and now compensating factors like endowments, deep-pocket givers and deferred maintenance have evaporated. 

In those years -- and the four recession-recovery cycles they encompass -- many churches made important changes in outdated liturgies, archaic distributions of power, leadership training and church facilities. Others resisted those changes. Either way, it made little difference in terms of congregational health factors such as giving, participation, membership, handling conflict and maintaining infrastructure. 

Recession or recovery, change or no-change, the grinding loss of membership and vitality continued unabated.  

I think it's time we saw that the world has changed, and what we know how to do -- Sunday liturgies, capable preaching, Sunday ministries of teaching and welcoming -- stopped being enough many years ago. 

In drifting away from church, you see, people aren't saying No to God or to faith. They are saying No to Sunday church. 

They do so for a variety of reasons. For some two-income families and hard-charging young adults, Sunday is the one day to get a slow start. Audience-style worship is too passive for a Web 2.0 world that is customer-centric and transactional. 

Even though modernized, the language of Sunday worship seems formulaic, anachronistic, too laden with denominational agenda. Decades of public bickering over sexuality, gender and doctrine have made some people wary. Public perceptions of Sunday church as a closed circle populated by smug, opinionated and older people haven't built bridges to young seekers. Over-involvement in partisan politics has hurt.

It's no one thing. Taken together, however, the many Nos to Sunday church add up to empty pews on Sunday morning and empty coffers. 

As increasingly desperate church leaders appeal to constituents' loyalty -- come on Sunday, pay for Sunday-focused staff and Sunday-justified facilities -- they discover one more No: many believers have found that faith has little to do with keeping institutions afloat. 

Instead, people are redirecting their faith-related activities, loyalties and dollars into a better "value proposition" than Sunday church alone can offer, namely, a dynamic mix of self-selected and self-directed opportunities for working out one's own faith. 

Many congregations saw the paradigm shifting and expanded their weekday, off-site and on-line ministries. Some have been extraordinarily successful in diversifying their ways of reaching people. An entrepreneurial spirit has yielded nimble responses to changing markets. 

The "Multichannel Church" is based on a fundamental known as "multichannel marketing," which uses many different channels to reach customers, such as retail store, catalog, web site, e-mail marketing. 

The Multichannel Church starts by affirming what it already knows how to do: provide Sunday ministries at a single site. Then the Multichannel Church adds more avenues of ministry, in an effort to reach more people.

Again, welcome! 

 

Tom