Understanding People as Individuals
It is important for churches to realize who they are called to reach.
Once realized, it is important for churches to learn more about these people. Understanding their culture, their needs, and their lifestyles will increase your potential to effectively reach them if you use that knowledge to focus on their needs and preach in a way that is relevant to their lives. Keep in mind that this will increase your potential but not maximize your potential to reach them.
If you want to maximize your potential, your church must go beyond stereotypes, demographic trends, and similarities. You must focus on the individual. It is good for your church to be able to understand and meet the general needs of the congregation and community, but it is more important that your church creates opportunities to understand and minister to people one-on-one.
Last month, David Maister shared some excellent points on his blog about the importance of avoiding generalization and treating people as individuals. A few points were:
- People do not want to be treated as a member of a group, or class, or market segment, or subset. They want to be treated as individuals.
- The essential lesson is that there is no one thing that all clients want.
- How quickly can you or your organization find out what the specific client wants and adapt to that clients’ individuality? How well do you truly listen, adapt and respond?
- Really great client service doesn’t mean figuring out a bunch of neat things that most people like and then doing those things to everyone. Client focus means being good at figuring out, in real time, what each client would prefer, and adapting as much as you can to those preferences.
Keep in mind it is not practical let alone possible to customize every detail for every individual. However, you ministry should have some flexibility and be able to meet and minister to people’s needs on an individual level. Are there any rigid policies keeping your church from meet individuals’ needs? How can your church better reach people at a one-on-one level?
Special thanks to MarketingMonger for highlighting Maister’s thoughts.
