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100 ways to get your church noticed

Author:	Neil Pugmire
Published By:	Kingsway (Eastbourne)
Pages:	272
Price:	£8.99
ISBN:	1 84291 240 2

Reviewed by David Small.

“In today’s society, we can rarely do anything without something screaming for our attention. In a typical day we will be exposed to more than 3,000 adverts.” These are the introductory words of Neil Pugmire in this excellent book that is full of ideas and challenges and aimed at anyone, like me, who has been given the task of communicating to their church and town with a limited budget.

Any book on this topic naturally reflects the age in which it is written, but this book with its web site (www.getyourchurchnoticed.com) stands a chance of being kept up to date as people share ideas with each other.

The headings of the various sections have a great deal of relevance to anyone involved in this somewhat thankless task.  Here’s a selection: Strategy; Identity; Building (external); Building (internal); Welcome Pack; Internal Displays; Weekly Leaflets; Parish Magazine; Website; Tourism; Text Messaging; and so on.

As someone who is currently involved in putting together, with others, a new welcome pack, I was excited by his four ideas under this heading. His welcome pack would have essential information about church activities with a DVD showing church activities in action. He also saw a much wider market than I envisaged by leaving such welcome packs in public places and giving them, through congregation members, to anyone moving into the town.

One other idea worth a mention is to make sure that your youth leaders have the mobile numbers of all the teenagers in the church and sending a regular text message to all the mobile phones in the church. Now there is a challenge for the magazine editor!