Fabulous Phonecalls

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How can Oceanside Church reach East Cooper? What would be the best way to do it? Do people really have home phones anymore? What about seeing if we could get a mission team to come down and help us? Pastor Ivey and I asked ourselves these questions about 4 or 5 months ago hoping we could get someone to really help us by making 100's of phone calls in a single week. We knew it was going to be a daunting task and didn't really know where to start.

First, I challenged several churches to help us. Then we had to find some kind of list of phone numbers other than just calling down the 35,000 or so numbers in the phone book. Then we had to get a list of workable survey questions. Finally, we had to plan an appropropriate date on the calendar to make it happen.

With God's help and a little ingenuity, we got all of the logisitcs together still having no idea if this would work. For those that don't know (as I didn't), getting 8% of the people to do our survey was the figure we were going with. That was what most churches got when they called. From that we should get 10% of those to be prospects. That means, if we could make 800 phone calls, we should get 64 people to answer our survey and of those, we should have a list of 6 homes that would be good prospects for our church.

Thanks to a small but motivated mission team from Common Ground Church in Eutawville, SC and a list of 1968 new movers we were able to get hold of, we set to work beginning this past Sunday night. We soon found out that people (male and female) like to speak to sweet southern ladies. The people we called were also very open once they agreed to answer our "community needs" survey. Finally, we could make around 30 phone calls an hour per caller.

Once we were finished, our percentages were higher that I was told we would get. 11% answered surveys. I'm just hoping we can get higher than normal percentages with the church attendance as well. As it stands, that means over the next months we should see 9 household join us. So, pray we can beat that percentage as well. God can do anything. He just wants us ready and obedient.

Here are the 5 questions:

• What do you think is the greatest need in our area?
  
• Do you actively attend a church?
  
• Why do you think most people don't go to church?
  
• If you were looking for a church to attend, what would you look for?
  
• How can we best pray for you?
  

Here are our findings:

1. For every 2 people that answered the phone, 1 would take our survey.

2. Most people do not actively attend church.

3. They said that people don't attend church for 5 major reasons (in order):

1) No time

2) Other beliefs or religion

3) Too tired

4) Boring

5) Not sure why

4. They said that they would look for these things in a church (in order):

1) A good worship service (33%)

2) Youth ministry (22%)

3) Children's ministry (7.5%)

3) Bible study (7.5%)

3) Friendly congregation (7.5%)

5. The prayer we asked for told us that there are lots of hurting people out there. We were able to pray with many of them right there on the phone.

We also took the time and effort to be as gracious as we could by sending thank you notes to everyone who finished our survey and asked them to join us for worship this Sunday morning. No matter the cost (even blisters on my writing finger), it was worth it to touch the lives of so many people in such a short time.

I also want to thank all of you that prayed. Believe me, wothout God's people praying, I'm sure we would never have made as many contacts. God will honor you for praying for us.

There are many people who are searching and hurting and without Christ. many are our neighbors. We pray as we follow up, there will be many who come to know the Lord and serve Him over these next months.

God is doing something great, and I'm just glad to be a part.

Because of the love of Calvary,

Pastor Trey Rhodes

Coming Soon to Oceanside...

the Strength Team and the Kinetic Festival

October 19-21, Under the Cabana nightly.

MyOceansideChurch.podbean.com - Oceanside's latest audio message.

www.MyOceansideChurch.com - for information, direction, pics, and more on Oceanside Church

www.OCAnnounce.info - for latest news and information about Oceanside Church

 

 

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