For the Sake of Outreach
by Andrea Bailey
From creating door hangers to managing one of Christendom’s most trafficked Web sites, Outreach, Inc. is serious about equipping churches in their evangelism efforts
Most churches have no idea they are a well-kept secret in their own community. Pastor Benny Perez at The Church at South Las Vegas did realize it — and was searching for a way to change it. Although his church of 300 was growing little by little, he was looking for a high impact way to establish his church’s presence in the city and open an ongoing channel of communication with his neighbors.
“I tried a few things, including a TV commercial, but I didn’t find what I was looking for,” Perez says. Then he stumbled onto San Diego-based Outreach, Inc., a provider of strategic marketing solutions for churches. He decided to try Outreach’s direct mail postcards, called ImpactCards. These oversized, customized mailers went out to the families of the South Las Vegas community, inviting them to attend a service at his church. Before long, a steady stream of visitors made their way through his doors.
Fast-forward three years. Perez had sent out six mailings of 50,000 to 100,000 ImpactCards promoting his church, its Easter egg hunt, and various other special events. He was thrilled with the results. In those same three years, The Church at South Las Vegas rapidly grew to 1,700 members, and 1,200 people attended the Easter egg hunt alone. The combination of a ripe community prepared by the Holy Spirit, and the right message articulated through the mailings created the momentum and impact that has helped The Church at South Las Vegas move forward.
Beginnings
Founded in 1996 in San Diego by corporate-marketing-manager-turned-church-planter Scott Evans, Outreach has quickly grown to become the largest provider of outreach products and services in North America. The company’s beginnings are rooted in a simple act of faith when Scott and his wife, Susan, walked away from a lucrative family business in Colorado to plant a church in Oceanside, Calif.
In 1992, as part of a small church planting team, Evans helped launch New Song, a Willow Creek Association Member Church. With his marketing background, Evans began to apply what were, at that time, unconventional communication practices to help them reach out to their neighbors in Oceanside. This approach brought 196 people to the church on its first Sunday. In the next few years, New Song Community Church grew to more than 1,000 — and other new area churches began asking Evans to help with their outreach efforts.
It wasn’t long before Evans realized God was calling him to help churches reach seekers through a new outreach model. So with just four employees, lots of creativity and a marketing degree from Colorado State University, Evans founded Outreach Marketing, Inc., a place where churches could find turn-key marketing solutions for their outreach needs.
The company was founded on the same mission that drives it today: To empower Christian churches to reach their communities for Jesus Christ. And the mission took wing when Evans met with leaders from the Willow Creek Association in 1997. God gave him their vision for ministry: To create a network of churches and ministries working together to reach every home in America with a personal invitation to a local Bible-believing church, and ultimately into a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
“We take seriously Christ’s command in Matthew 22:9: ‘Now go out to the street corners and invite everyone you see,’” says Evans. “We love to partner with churches to help them fulfill their calling to reach out.”
And the team at Outreach shares his vision. Take Brae Wyckoff, for instance. Six years ago, Wyckoff made a New Year’s resolution never to go to church again. And then an ImpactCard arrived in his mailbox. The Holy Spirit pierced through his resistance, and Wyckoff found himself back in church three months later. The result? He, his wife, children and more than 30 relatives and friends have come to Christ — all stemming from that single invitation. Today, Wyckoff manages Outreach’s supply chain and helps ship out millions of ImpactCards to churches.
Understanding what helped bring people like Wyckoff to Christ, Evans built Outreach on principles he calls the Four Laws of Effective Outreach for churches: 1) Establishing an Outreach Identity, 2) Attracting Visitors, 3) Connecting Attendees, and 4) Equipping Members to be Inviters.
“Everything we do for churches fits somewhere in the Four Laws model,” Evans says, “and we’ve found that churches that consistently apply these four principles have healthy, effective, reproducing congregations. Churches that are not experiencing effective outreach always are weak in one or more of these laws.”
After partnering with Outreach and experiencing the Four Laws, churches are often delighted with the results. “Much of our success can be directly attributed to the design, mailing services, and superior customer service that we received from Outreach,” says Pastor Walter Kaiser of Forrest Pointe Community Church in Cleveland, Ohio. Outreach became a WCA Member and Select Service Provider in 1998, making its products available to all Member Churches at a significant savings. (Just ask for your discount when you call!)
Growing Up
But even more exciting things were in store for the fledgling company. After growing 50 percent in the first two years, Outreach acquired SermonCentral.com, a small sermon database, in 1999 and grew it to become the largest Web site of its kind in the world, serving more than 200,000 church leaders a week.
In 2000, Outreach introduced the Four Laws of Effective Outreach training seminars, featuring a powerful team of seasoned experts who visit churches to show them the fundamentals of reaching their communities. And in 2002, the company launched Outreach magazine, a publication especially for church leaders devoted to outreach. The highly respected magazine now reaches 80,000 leaders of growth-oriented churches. Outreach magazine recently received the Silver “Eddie” award by Folio, the magazine industry publication, making it the top ranked Christian magazine in 2005.
Former Willow Creek teaching pastor and author Lee Strobel says with a grin, “It’s pastoral malpractice not to subscribe to Outreach magazine!”
Since 2003, Outreach has hosted the annual National Outreach Convention, a three-and-a-half day event in San Diego with speakers and workshops on all facets of outreach. Thousands of church leaders have come hungry for fresh ideas and approaches for reaching their communities. Also in 2003, Outreach formed its Events division to help churches create and host “invitable” events to attract unchurched people to local churches through high-quality comedians, speakers, and musicians.
“Outreach is about building bridges to the unchurched in order to more effectively and more often share the gospel of Jesus Christ,” explains Evans. “The church has the greatest message in the world, and yet so often we either don’t communicate the Good News or we communicate it so poorly that we do more harm than good.”
Several years ago, Outreach Marketing became Outreach, Inc., and today the company has six divisions: Marketing Products, Training, Publishing, Events, Web Properties, and its Outreach Media Group. While the divisions operate as separate ministry-business units, they support each other and the global mission of reaching more people for Christ.
In addition to partnering with local churches, the company is intentional about joining forces with other ministries to help equip churches in their outreach efforts. Various initiatives have included partnerships with the WCA, Campus Crusade (9-11 Remembrance), Purpose-Driven Ministries (40 Days of Purpose), Zondervan (Faith Under Fire), World Vision (Faith in Action), and the International Bible Society. In recent years, they have also developed strategic partnerships with Icon Entertainment (The Passion of the Christ), Disney (The Chronicles of Narnia) and most recently New Line Cinema (The Nativity Story) to leverage spiritually themed films as an outreach opportunity for the church. This fall Outreach is offering tools and resources to help churches take advantage of The Nativity Story because of its powerful retelling of the biblical account of Christ’s birth.
Outreach today
Now about 125 employees, Outreach has in many ways helped revolutionize the way churches communicate with the unchurched outside their doors. Through Outreach’s catalogs and online store, pastors and church leaders find affordable, attention-grabbing designs, well-crafted copy and innovative communication angles for reaching the unchurched. Each product and service is specifically designed to empower Christian churches to reach their communities for Christ. Today, Outreach has helped more than 50,000 churches deliver their message, distributing more than 200 million invitations to churches.
From humble origins to a now dynamic company helping thousands of churches advance the gospel, Outreach looks forward to an exciting future of continued innovation and service — watching for the next opportunity to empower the church in relevant outreach.
And not only do churches transform lives when they do outreach — they themselves are changed as well. Lynne Marian, vice president of Outreach, puts it this way. “When you invite someone over for dinner it changes the way you look at your home. Suddenly you see things through the eyes of your guest and focus on what his or her experience in your home will be.
“When a church, maybe a church that has never been outreach focused, starts to reach out, that’s exactly what happens. What matters is not the comfort of the regular attendees, but instead the experience of their visitors and whether or not that experience will bring those people closer to God.”
Outreach has seen thousands of churches make that transformation — and the result has been many lives touched by the love of Christ.
If you’d like to know more about how Outreach, Inc. can empower your church to reach your community for Christ, visit www.outreach.com.
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