Keeping our Mission

It has been such an adventurous time these last few months! They have been trying, but they continue to be a great opportunity as well.

Many may be thinking that due to stay at home orders, the church has gone dormant. Let me assure you that is not the case. In our efforts to keep our church community spiritually fed, we have been shown that there is an entire population of people we have not been reaching!

There are a couple ways that you can help to further the reach of our online efforts! You may be wondering what can I do, I am not tech savy. I don’t know much about computers. I will explain how it takes little effort to make great advances for God’s kingdom.

Pray

…You do not have, because you do not ask.

James 4:2

The MOST important action is to pray. While online streaming is another method of ministry, our message is still the same! If we want to see God work in great ways, we need to ask. Not just a quick second prayer, but earnestly prayer for God to work in ways we can not! Show God we are serous about wanting to reach the lost through this ministry.

Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not rain on the earth.

James 5:17

Share

Go therefore and make disciples of all nations

Matthew 28:16

The second method by which you can help is to use your social media accounts to spread the message. You have connections and influence that no one else has. That means there are people that will be reached only by you sharing. Hopefully the thought of others going to an eternal hell horrifies you as it does me. We need to get this out! People are having a very hard time during all this lockdown and we have the message of hope for them. Let’s do our part and share it.

Facebook

If you are on Facebook, when you watch the stream there are two things you can do. First, click the like button. This will actually alert your connections on Facebook. The second is to click the share button and make a public post. This will post the stream to your timeline for anyone to see.

YouTube

If you are watching our steam from YouTube you can share in a similar fashion. Once you are either watching the video or you search for our channel, click the “Like” button at the bottom of the video. This again will boost our video’s rank and it will show up on other people pages. By clicking “subscribe” that will also have a similar effect. So if you do both you get a double!

The effects of sharing

If you are like me, I am a visual person. So, here is a visual so you can see how we are doing.

We started only streaming on Facebook, and that is still currently the main way our services are viewed. Once we started our YouTube channel we saw some movement to that platform and some to our website as some of us had better results with their service. Thus we see a peak in April of about 128 views, and then slightly declines as some have moved to these other platforms.. But the fact that in one Sunday we surpassed most Sunday’s in our church is so exciting! But God can do more and I believe he wants to meet that but far surpass it!

With YouTube we have seen a steep incline in the use of that platform.

While it has not been as strong yet as Facebook, it is on a good incline. The Impressions number in the top left corner, 320, is when someone finishes a video, YouTube “showcases” our video for them to watch. Showcases means it shows other content the viewer may be interested in. The next number called “Impressions click-through rate” at 10.9%, means that percentage of people clicked the “showcase” link and watched some or all of our video. So 32 more people saw the message because you liked and subscribed to the channel! That is the effect your “like’s” and subscribes have!

While Facebook did decline slightly you can see that together with our YouTube view we are still over 110 views for last Sunday.

I hope this has gotten you excited at the possibilities of how God can use our ministry in a way that we could not even comprehend just a few short months ago. This blows my mind! And we have more to come! Our command is to disciple people. In the coming weeks we are working on ways that we can accomplish this through a digital means.

So this Sunday, whether you are watching on Facebook or watching on YouTube, let’s all do our part! Click that Like, share the post, subscribe to the channel, and above all else, pray for God to use this ministry. Let’s let the King of the harvest do what He does best!

May His name be praised forever!

James Golden