The other day I came across this book  at my local used bookstore: The Comprehensive Guide to Cassette Ministry: How ordinary Christians can have extraordinary impact for the kingdom of God. 

Here’s the product description from Amazon:

"Multiply your effectiveness for the kingdom of God through cassette ministry! These ministry tools will expand and multiply how God can use you in new and dynamic ways. Share a copy of last week's sermon. Or, spread the Gospel by handing out New Testament cassettes. The possibilities for cassette ministry are endless. And, it's so easy to give away cassettes! Anyone, anywhere can multiply his effectiveness for the kingdom of God by giving away cassettes."

Cassettes are so easy to give away!  Woohoo!

About a year ago I started holding office hours in a local coffee shop.

Sometimes people came, sometimes they didn’t, but the experience opened our congregation up to a new way of thinking about our presence in the towns that surround our congregation.

As a result, we have now held events in four towns beyond Woburn.·I believe these too will become stepping stones to something more.

Here are nine reason that going beyond our building has worked for us and may work for you too:

Churches often define their success in welcoming newcomers by the number of people that become members of their church.  At Redeemer we have shifted our focus to improving the quality of our welcome and it feels like maybe we're on to something.  We’ve found our way mostly through trial and error - and listening carefully to the feedback of our visitors and newest members.  These are the top ten things we have learned about welcoming newcomers to our church over the last five years:

My library, the Woburn Public Library, was designed by the renown architect H.H. Richardson in 1897.  It is a beautiful building, but it is too small to meet current demands and the building condition is deteriorating.  The Library recently received a $5 million grant from the Mass Board of Library Commissioners to expand the building, but the majority of the cost, around $16 million, must come from the City of Woburn.  It’s a hard sell in difficult economic times. 

However, the library has redoubled its efforts to secure funding from the City through the Yes To Our Library campaign and they are doing an incredible job using social media to build support and make their case.    It’s a great case study about leveraging social media for your cause.  Here are some of the ways they are doing it:

The world doesn’t need another blog.  The internet is saturated with over 200 million blogs about everything under the sun.  At the same time, some studies show that blogs may be a declining medium.  In a recent Pew Internet and American Life study, blogs were the only social media that decreased in usage across all generational categories.  Both the ubiquity and uncertain future of blogging seem to argue against investing the time and attention it takes to maintain a good blog.  Here are six reasons I blog anyway:

“I think it's true that any congregation has to figure out how its style of ministry affects more than one generation." - Wes Granberg-Michaelson, general secretary for the Reformed Church in America

A couple of friends recently flagged The Schullers: A tale of two churches by Nicole Santa Cruz in the LA Times.  It is a cautionary tale about what happens when a church ceases to adapt its ministry to changing times.  In particular, it is about how the Crystal Cathedral, a church that once captured and even helped to shape the zeitgeist of American Christianity and culture, fell so out of touch with culture that it has now declared bankruptcy.