Ancient Future

Steve Kropp has made a new album called Ancient Future with some of the old hymns done in a new way. He gave them out to folks at New Season for free to use as tools to witness and invite friends, relatives, co-workers and neighbors.



More info about the project here.


Check out the teases here.

New Neighbors

One of the best times to reach new families in your community is when they first move into your community. Most churches who have any type of desire to reach the people in their community have some form of new neighbor outreach.

We are currently using ReachingAmerica.com. Here is how it works:

• They identify the new neighbors in your community.
• They send three predesigned by you postcards to your new neighbors in the first 30 days.
• They can furnish you with the names and addresses of the people they sent the postcards to so you can do your own follow up.
• You can choose whom to send the postcards to by zip code or radius.

The benefit to this program is that it provides multiple contacts very early on in a timely manner. Also, it will pay for itself which is good since it is $2.88 per new neighbor (versus about .33 cents to just get the names and do your own mailing.

We are also recruiting neighborhood captains from our church who will deliver new neighbor bags to new neighbors using the names we furnish from this service.

Another time to reach people is right after they have had a baby. Unfortunately, while lists can be purchased of "new parents" the minimum quantity required- say 500- makes it cost prohibitive. I am still looking for such a list that does not require minimums.

We're Moving

Pending the approval of a county permit we will have our first Sunday at our new location- Lee Hill Elementary School. Here are some things we are doing to raise awareness about our move in the community.

· We will pray, and pray and pray for the God who can do more than we can even ask or imagine to great things in this move.

· We will encourage one another to blab to all who will listen in our circles of friends, and amongst our relatives, neighbors, and co-workers and invite, invite, invite.

· We will gather to put out 1,000 door hangers at various townhouse developments surrounding the school. As we do so we will be praying for the persons in those developments.
· During February, before Easter and before Mother’s Day we will be mailing out 5,000 invitational postcards to our neighbors in the areas surrounding Lee Hill.

· We will be sending letters to the 1,000 or so persons identified by the “Phones for You Campaign” to inform them of our move and invite them to join us.

· For the six weeks after our move we will place special ads in the Free Lance Star (1 every two weeks) to announce our move and invite persons to join us.

· We will begin running our weekly “New United Methodist Church forming in Massaponax” ad in the Saturday religious section of the Free Lance Star to reach the United Methodists that move to our area.

· We will launch our redesigned website recognizing that for most people seeking a church in our day the first step they will take is to find more information on the web. We want to make a good impression.

· We will begin running monthly ads in the Lee Hill Crier newsletter (the newsletter of the Lee Hill Subdivision).

· We will be obtaining the services of Reaching America. This service identifies new home owners in our mission field and send on our behalf three personalized postcards from New Season Church in the first three weeks to our newest neighbors. We will be asking regular attendees at New Season to volunteer as neighborhood captains and deliver new neighbor bags to these neighbors.

· We have obtained 100 yard signs that will be strategically placed at the entrances/exits of subdivision, at intersections and in retail areas that say New Season Church- Sundays- 10:00 a.m.- Lee Hill Elementary School-www.NewSeasonUMC.org.

New Website Design

Check out the new website for New Season Church. Many thanks to Matt Montoro of Third Stream Music/ Design for his creative ability in making this a reality.

There are many sites out there that will give you some good ideas about how to do church websites (which many churches need). But here are some things we used to help lead us in design.

• We wanted to keep it fairly simple. The tendency is to get too cluttered and try to convey too much information. A person looking at your site will only spend a few seconds to look at it before moving on.
• We wanted to serve two purposes. The prinmary purpose was to provide people who are thinking of attending New Season with a taste of who we are. An ancillary purpose was to provide a place for regular attendees to get info (previous messages, sign up info, etc).
• We recognized that our site had to be taken up a notch because this is the first place people who are searching are going to look before they decide to check out New Season. This is in many respects our first impression.

Like I said you can Google "church website design recommendations" and get all kinds of good advice, these are just some of the things we used to guide us.