Visitors Judge Your Church Before Sunday
It's Thursday night, and there's a family in your town, six weeks into living here, sitting on the couch after their kids went down. One of them has your church pulled up on their phone.
Your Instagram, specifically, because that's the app she was already in.
They're barely reading. Just scrolling fast, and somewhere in the next ten seconds they're deciding whether you're worth a Sunday morning.
I get how that sounds. A lot of pastors hear that and think, well, that's no way to pick a church. I understand that instinct. This is still how a lot of families choose a church now. So the question is what you do about it.
What they're looking for
When somebody's looking for a church, they've usually already got a reason. They just moved. They're looking for answers. Maybe they left somewhere that hurt them. They sat in a church for years, nobody really knew them, and they finally admitted that to themselves and walked. So they're doing research. They've been burned, and they don't want it happening twice.
I have friends and family who've avoided churches entirely because every public channel was dead and lifeless. My generation is wary of institutions that can't represent themselves well.
They already have your information. Service times are on Google. What they're looking for is connection, right off the bat. What the culture feels like at a glance. Whether your pastor is going to yell at them for forty-five minutes. They want to hear a minute of the preaching. They want some sign that this place has life in it before they risk a Sunday.
Where most feeds go wrong
Your feed should be doing evangelism work tonight. My guess is the last thing on it was a men's breakfast flyer from last month, and the sermon clip next to it has audio that sounds like it was recorded in a stairwell.
Younger people read that as "this church isn't for me," or worse, "nobody here really cares." The generous reading, the one where they assume your staff is busy doing real ministry, never occurs to them. That's wildly unfair to a church that's genuinely faithful and genuinely loving. It's still the conclusion they draw. I've seen it happen again and again.
We need to show up in that space, weekly, consistently. Social platforms get shoved under the rug at churches because likes and comments don't look like Kingdom impact. For anyone under 30, this is one of the ways you meet them where they already are.
Do it for the locals, for the potential visitors, even just to give your younger congregants something to share with their friends.
Don't underestimate consistency, though. I've seen churches who commit to it reach far beyond what they thought possible. Most churches never get there because the platforms only really start rewarding you after months of showing up. You post for six weeks, you get almost nothing back, it feels like shouting into a canyon, and you stop.
Two real options
I want you to think for a moment. Most pastors spend at least eight hours a week preparing a sermon, and plenty of them spend more than fifteen. Unless you do something with it, all of that is useless after Sunday morning. It took a long time to grow your church. You can't expect to broaden its reach online overnight.
For most churches this is a capacity problem. Your comms person has four other jobs. Your volunteer is in grad school. Nobody's being lazy. There genuinely isn't anybody with fifteen free hours a month.
So there are two real options.
You build capacity internally, which means somebody owns this, gets hours protected for it, and gets a budget line. Or you hand it to people who do this for a living and actually care about the capital-C Church.
There are good services out there that do this work well. I founded one of them, Handwoven. If your church wants to get serious about this, you can start here: handwoven.church
And if you'd rather build it in house, please commit. The third option, which is what most churches pick, is doing it halfway, or not at all.
What's on the other side
Months in, you start getting comments from strangers. Then a family shows up on a Sunday and says they found you online. Then a few more. Eventually you've got enough reach to start a whole funnel for new visitors.
Right now, there's someone in your area scrolling their phone, wondering if they'll ever find a church they resonate with. There's no reason it shouldn't be yours.
Zach