The Communication Crisis: How the Grow + Nurture Plan Can Transform Your Church

INTRODUCTION:
Why Your Church Needs to Rethink Its Communications Plan… Now

In today’s rapidly changing world, churches face an urgent need to transform their communication strategies into sustainable, repeatable systems that produce results. However, lacking a belief-aligned church marcom plan often results in fragmented, reactive, and inwardly focused communications—missing the opportunity to reach the lost and nurture your community.

A well-structured church communication plan attracts new individuals to your church and strengthens the bonds within your current congregation, deepening engagement and fostering loyalty. The primary goals of any church communication plan should be twofold:

• Grow: Increase the number of people engaging with your church, both online and in-person.
• Nurture: Deepen relationships within your community through consistent and meaningful resources that offer hope and help.

This guide is designed to help your church create and implement a belief-aligned Grow + Nurture Communications Plan that fosters continuous growth and engagement. This plan serves both the unchurched and the churched by building a cycle of trust and connection. When executed effectively, it guides individuals within your community on a transformative journey—from hopelessness to curiosity to commitment—cultivating life- changing relationships with Jesus.

Who is Your Church’s Community?

Your church’s community refers to your addressable audience, consisting of two groups:

• INTERNAL AUDIENCE: People who currently attend your church, in addition to those who have engaged with your church in the past.
• EXTERNAL AUDIENCE: Individuals in your local community and surrounding areas not currently connected to your church.

Understanding these groups allows you to tailor your communications effectively, offering hope and help to meet their unique needs.

This isn’t about flashy marketing gimmicks; it’s about aligning your church’s communication strategies and tactics with your belief-driven mission to bring hope and help to a world in desperate need.

This guide introduces a plan to help your church:

• Build trust through belief-driven communication.
• Create a scalable and sustainable system to attract and retain people.
• Expand your impact throughout your community, both online and in-person.

Whether you’re a small congregation experiencing stagnant growth, or a thriving multi- campus church, this plan offers an actionable framework to transform, optimize, and expand your ministry’s impact.

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CHAPTER 1:
The Core Problem – Why Churches Struggle to Grow + Nurture Communities

Churches today face a critical challenge. While their mission to love God, love others, and make disciples remains constant, how people engage (if they even engage at all) with faith communities has shifted dramatically. Modern society has reshaped how people seek connection, support, and spiritual growth – leaving many churches struggling to keep up.

The issue isn’t a lack of heart or effort—it’s a disconnect between the church’s mission, its understanding of people’s needs, and the strategies required to bridge the two. When churches fail to align their mission with clear, audience-focused communication and scalable systems, they miss opportunities to reach the lost, engage members, and fulfill their calling in an increasingly digital world.

THREE COMMON MISSTEPS

MISSTEP #1: Generic Messaging Fails to Connect

Too often, churches communicate with a “one-size-fits-all” approach, assuming their message will resonate equally with everyone. The reality? People have vastly different needs, questions, and expectations. When communication doesn’t address these unique needs, it feels impersonal – leaving people unseen and disengaged. Examples could include:

• A single parent might seek practical help with parenting.
• A young professional may feel disconnected and crave community.
• A long-time member might be yearning for discipleship.

MISSTEP #2: Inward-Focused Communication Misses the Disconnected Audience

Church messaging often prioritizes internal matters: event details, announcements, and ministry updates. While important to your internal community audience, these rarely address the more profound struggles or questions those in your external community audience face.

For someone outside of the faith, this type of information feels irrelevant. Churches risk alienating people and missing opportunities to transform lives through the gospel with no outward messaging that meets them where they are.

MISSTEP #3: A Lack of Strategy Leads to Fragmentation

Without a proper strategic communication plan, churches often operate reactively – posting on social media, sending emails, or updating websites only when something urgent arises. This results in:

• Inconsistency: Messaging that feels disjointed and confusing.
• Burnout: Staff and volunteers are stretched thin by last- minute efforts.
• Missed Opportunities: Overlooking moments when people are most receptive to the church’s message.

THE CONSEQUENCES OF MISALIGNED COMMUNICATION

1. The Unchurched Feel Overlooked: A young adult searching for “how to overcome anxiety” may visit your website and find only a calendar of church events. They leave without the hope they are in desperate need of.
2. Members Disengage: Without intentional communication that fosters connection, even long-time members may feel disconnected and consider leaving.
3. Trust Erodes: When communication doesn’t align with a church’s core belief and mission, it creates a Say-Do Gap®—a disconnect between what the church says and does. Over time, this erodes trust within the congregation and the broader community.

THE OPPORTUNITY: TURNING CHALLENGES INTO MINISTRY IMPACT

While these challenges are real, they also present a significant opportunity. Churches aligning their core belief and mission with a Grow + Nurture approach can achieve transformative change—expanding their reach and the depth of their relationships. Imagine a church where:

• Your church’s mission comes alive—not just in words but in every interaction.
• The lost feel seen and supported as they take their first steps toward receiving hope and getting help.
• Members feel connected, valued, and empowered to grow in their walk.

This is the power of belief-driven communication. By addressing core challenges and embracing the Grow + Nurture Communications Plan, your church can bridge the gap between its mission and its messaging, creating a lasting impact throughout your entire community.

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Being Belief- Driven – Aligning Your Comms With Your Core Belief And Mission

Every small-c church—referring to local congregations—shares a universal mission: to love God, love others, and make disciples. However, the way this mission is expressed varies from church to church. Each congregation serves in unique ways, shaped by its community, leadership, and values. This distinct focus sets your church apart—it’s where you plant your flag.

Your core belief is the foundation of your church’s brand strategy. It’s more than a mission statement; it’s the reason your church exists and the driving force behind everything you do. Whether your focus is discipling families, serving the marginalized, and/or creating a vibrant worship experience, this belief should inform every aspect of your organization— especially your communications.

What Do We Mean by Communications?

Communications include every message your church shares across any format or medium. Whether verbal or written, in person or digital; each communication reflects your church’s core belief and influences how people experience your ministry. From a sermon to a social media post, every interaction serves as an opportunity to demonstrate your belief in action.

What Does It Mean to Be Belief-Driven?

Belief-driven communication ensures that every message your church shares reflects your core belief and puts it into action.

At BLVR®, we call this closing the Say-Do Gap®: ensuring alignment between what your church says and what it does. When your communication reflects your belief, it builds trust, inspires engagement, and fosters genuine connection.

Misaligned communication, however, leads to confusion and erodes trust—undermining your ability to make a lasting impact.

Key Insight: It’s not enough to tell people what your church believes—you must show them. Words matter, but actions back it up.

The Shift From Saying to Proving

Churches often fall into the trap of talking about themselves— highlighting programs, events, and ministry wins—while overlooking the deeper needs of their community. Effective communication isn’t about selling your church; it’s about offering hope and help through practical steps for transformation.

By aligning communication with your belief, you can:

1. Build Trust: Ensure every message reinforces what your church stands for.
2. Attract the Unchurched: Address the real struggles of those searching for hope and help.
3. Strengthen Relationships: Deepen engagement with your members by reflecting their values and needs.

Applying Belief to Your Comms

A belief-driven church ensures that every message reflects its core belief. This alignment builds trust and ensures that all communication flows from the foundation of your belief, effectively supporting the church’s mission.

For example, a church that believes in “bringing hope and healing to the broken” might express this by:

• Creating a sermon series that addresses how mental illness impacts students and young adults.
• Publishing blog posts that offer empathy, encouragement, and resources rather than judgment.

The impact is profound when your church’s communication aligns with its core belief. It builds trust, fosters connection, and inspires action. The Grow + Nurture Communications Plan ensures that every interaction reflects your core belief, empowering your mission and driving growth and engagement.

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Understanding Your Audience — From General to Hyperpersonal

Effective communication begins with understanding who you’re trying to reach and what they need. While this seems obvious, it’s an area where many churches fall short. Generic, one-size-fits-all messages fail to resonate with various people within your community, leaving both the disconnected external and internal community audiences feeling unseen and uncared for.

The Pitfall of Generic Communication

When communication fails to address the unique needs of your audience, it feels impersonal and irrelevant. This leads to higher website bounce rates, email unsubscribes, social media unfollows, and overall disengagement from the church.

Common Mistakes Include:

• Website Content That Misses the Mark: Prioritizing service times or event details over addressing real-life questions. This often causes visitors to leave the site immediately, never returning because they didn’t find what they needed.
• One-Size-Fits-All Emails: Sending generic messages to your entire contact list instead of tailoring emails to specific audience segments. Such messages are often ignored because they fail to connect emotionally or address practical needs.

Key Insight: People are more likely to engage with personal and relevant messages. You can build trust and inspire meaningful action by classifying your community into audience groups and tailoring communications to address their specific struggles, aspirations, and questions.

Step 1: Segment Your Community into Audience Groups

Audience segmentation involves grouping people by shared characteristics or needs. This helps your church create content that speaks directly to their concerns and aspirations. Audience groups should be organized into two primary buckets.

Group #1: Demographic Audience Groups

Group people by gender, age, family status, life situation, circumstances, and experience.

Group #2: Pain Point Audience Groups

The table below list some, but by no means all, of the possible pain point categories and sub-categories that people are dealing with.

After you have defined your audience groups, it’s essential to assign an owner/leader for each group who will lead the Grow + Nurture efforts. A pastor, a staff member, or a dedicated volunteer can fill this role.

Step 2: Develop Audience Personas

Creating audience personas helps clarify and sharpen your messaging for each audience segment. An audience persona is a detailed profile representing the audience group segment within your community.

Step 3: Develop Audience-Centric Content

It’s not about you. No, your content begins and ends with your audience. While it can be tempting to create content that focus on who you are and what you do, your audience doesn’t really care. They are searching for outcomes, for solutions, and an end to whatever pain they are feeling in their personal lives. So give them what they need to get closer to their desired outcomes, offer solutions to their problems.

Effective communication acknowledges that the unique groups within your internal and external community have distinct pain points. Once you’ve identified these challenges, you can craft solutions that guide your audience toward the desired outcomes.

Your audience-specific content should be hopeful and helpful, addressing their struggles, providing actionable solutions, and pointing to transformative results. Consistently delivering high- quality, engaging content positions your church as a trusted resource and a beacon of hope.

Key Elements for Creating Audience-Centric Content:

• Church Brand Guidelines: Ensure all content aligns with your church’s verbal identity and editorial standards. These guidelines should be clearly documented, such as in an organized Google Doc, for easy access and consistency.
• Content Creation Circle: Develop a unique Content Creation Circle for each audience persona. This framework should highlight their pain points, desired outcomes, and your church’s tactics to help them achieve transformation.
• Content Ideas: Brainstorm a library of helpful and hopeful content ideas tailored to each audience group. Examples include message series, testimonial blog posts, downloadable PDF guides, events, and curated third-party resources.
• Use AI Tools: Leverage AI tools like ChatGPT to streamline your content creation process. Start by providing the AI with your brand guidelines, content creation circle, and a specific content idea to generate a first draft. Refine and personalize the content before sharing it with your audience to ensure it aligns with your church’s voice.
• Content Calendar: Establish a realistic content calendar to maintain consistency and avoid burnout. Decide on a monthly or quarterly cadence and identify a cornerstone item for each period. Cornerstone items—such as a resource, event, program, or message series—serve as the foundation for additional cobblestone pieces, which include supporting blogs, social media posts, emails, or short videos that tie back to the central theme.

The Opportunity

When your communication addresses the unique needs of both your external and internal audiences, it builds trust, deepens engagement, and inspires meaningful action. This approach transforms individual lives within your community and amplifies your church’s impact, fostering both spiritual and organizational growth.

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Grow Your Audience — Consistently Build Your Contact Lists

When people are not on your contact list, they are Unaddressable, meaning your church cannot provide them with the personalized hope and help they need. However, when someone joins your contact list, they become Addressable, enabling you to share tailored messages that foster connection, offer support, and lead to life transformation

This makes your church’s Contact List one of its most valuable assets. The more extensive and segmented your contact list, the greater your capacity to communicate effectively and create meaningful impact through transformed lives.

Audience-Specific Contact List

Many churches rely on a single, general contact list for all communications. This often results in generic, one-size-fits-all emails sent to everyone, which fail to resonate with specific needs and interests. To truly engage your audience, this approach must change.

A more effective strategy is creating unique contact lists for your church’s audience groups. By tailoring your communications to specific groups, you can ensure your messages are relevant, meaningful, and actionable, fostering deeper trust and engagement.

Elements of a Contact

At a minimum, it is very important that your contact list contain the following data points:

The 3 Steps to Growing Your Contact List

Building and expanding your church’s audience contact lists requires a clear, systematic approach. The process begins with organizing existing contacts, adding new ones, and setting achievable growth goals.

STEP #1: Start With What You Have

Begin by creating separate spreadsheets for each of your church’s audience groups. Each spreadsheet should include columns for the key contact data points listed in the previous table.

If you already have a general contact list, export it into a spread- sheet. While it may be time-consuming, carefully categorize the contacts into audience-specific lists. This organization is foundational for targeted and effective communication.

STEP #2: Add New Contacts Into Your Lists

To grow your contact lists, you must proactively add new individuals. Start by reviewing your audience group lists and identifying people from your internal church audience who can be included.

The most consistent way to expand your lists is through web forms on audience-specific landing pages of your church website.

Examples of Effective Web Forms:

• Downloadable Resources: Offer gated content, such as a PDF guide or eBook, that requires visitors to provide their contact details to access.
• Help or Prayer Requests: Provide forms for people to request consultation, help, or prayer.
• Event Registrations: Use forms for signing up for events, workshops, or group gatherings.

At a minimum, every web form should collect:

• First Name
• Email Address

Once submitted, the contact’s information should auto-populate the appropriate audience-specific list in your CRM system. Automating this process ensures efficiency and reduces manual work.

STEP #3 – Set List Growth Goals

Establishing clear contact list growth goals ensures consistent progress and accountability. For example, if your Women’s audience group list starts with 147 contacts in January, set a realistic goal to grow it to 250 contacts by the end of the quarter.

Why Growth Goals Matter:

• Goals provide a measurable target to track progress.
• Goals encourage creativity in identifying new ways to attract contacts.
• Goals hold the audience group leader responsible for active engagement and growth.

Monitoring progress toward these goals fosters intentionality and ensures your contact lists expand in alignment with your church’s mission to reach and nurture your community.

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Nurture Your Audience — Lead People on a Curated Engagement Path

Capturing contact information is the first step in fostering meaningful relationships. The next critical step is nurturing these individuals through a well-designed funnel to provide hope + help. Each step in this funnel should lead to life transformation and ultimately contribute to growing your church’s impact. This is where you build trust by consistently offering hopeful and helpful interactions tailored to each audience group.

Offline vs. Digital Tactics for Nurturing

Nurturing can happen through various channels, including but not limited to:

• Offline Tactics: In-person meetings, handwritten notes, or physical mailers that foster personal connection.
• Digital Tactics: Emails, social media posts, webinars, or digital advertising campaigns.

This guide will focus on email, as it remains the fastest and most cost-effective way to consistently nurture your audience through the Hope + Help Funnel.

Why Email Communication Matters

According to Hubspot’s annual research study, email content has an impressive return on investment – an average of $36 for every $1 spent. And, email content generates three times more leads than traditional marketing, all while costing up to 62% less.

Email marketing isn’t just about immediate gains; it’s about nurturing long-term relationships with your audience by fostering loyalty.

Nurture Email Sequences

The Problem With Random Emails

One-off, sporadic emails are ineffective because they lack consistency and fail to build trust. Consistent email communication reinforces your church’s identity, demonstrates reliability, and nurtures ongoing engagement with your audience.

The Power of Email Sequences

An effective nurture strategy revolves around thoughtfully designed email sequences. These should be:

• Campaign-Based: Structured around a monthly or quarterly focus tied to a cornerstone campaign item, such as a sermon series, event, or resource.
• Automated: Delivered at consistent intervals (e.g., weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly) through automated workflows.

Cornerstone and Cobblestone Approach

• Cornerstone Items: Foundational topics, such as an upcoming event or major initiative, that serve as the anchor for your email sequence.
• Cobblestone Items: Supporting messages that break the cornerstone topic into bite-sized pieces with deeper insights.

This method ensures consistent communication that keeps your audience engaged while advancing them through the funnel.

Nurture Email Format

Avoid elaborate, marketing-heavy designs for your emails. Research shows that plain-text emails—those resembling personal messages between friends—perform better. They also take less time to produce, cost less, and feel more authentic to recipients.

What to Include:

• Subject Line: Short, relevant, and engaging.
• Body: Clear, concise, and aligned with your belief-driven mission.
• Call-to-Action (CTA): Direct and compelling, encouraging the next step in engagement.

Strategic Transitional Moments

To guide your audience through each stage of the Hope + Help Funnel, you need to create clear opportunities for them to take the next step. These transitional moments are the keys to moving contacts closer to meaningful engagement and life transformation.

Examples of Transitional Moments:

• Event Invitations: Encourage small group or workshop attendance.
• One-on-one Meetings: Offer a coffee chat or pastoral check-in.
• Personalized Outreach: Send a handwritten note, text, or follow-up phone call.
• Milestone Recognition: Acknowledge anniversaries, baptisms, or volunteer milestones to deepen the connection.

The Result: Deeper Connections

By implementing well-designed nurture strategies, your church can move contacts from passive observers to active participants. This process builds trust, strengthens relationships, and empowers individuals to take meaningful steps in their spiritual journeys.

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CONCLUSION

The Grow + Nurture Communication Plan is a total ministry approach that goes beyond the status quo. The power of belief-driven communication bridges the gap between what your church says and what it does. It builds trust, fosters connection, and transforms lives.

When implemented effectively, this plan enables your church to:

• Grow: Attract and engage more people, both online and in-person, by meeting them where they are.
• Nurture: Strengthen relationships within your community through consistent, meaningful, and hope-filled content.

The time to act is now. With intentionality and alignment, your church can create a lasting impact—one that transforms lives and advances the gospel in your community and beyond.

Start the Journey Today! Every email, post, sermon, and interaction can be a ministry moment. By adopting belief-driven communication, your church can move from strategy to transformation, making the love of Jesus tangible to every individual in your community.