Strategic Thinking

At King’s we would be able to say on any given Sunday, or at any given major event that we do, exactly why we’re doing it and at what point on the Rick Warren circles (community, crowd, committed, core) we find our ‘target audience’. So when some years ago we did our Freedom event, which was to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade - in our context a massive, massive issue as we are in very multicultural context - our team discussed together and said ‘this is how we’re pitching it.’ We identified our target audience.


The result was three Sunday meetings and 1400 people through the doors. That was a big Sunday for us. The mayor of Lewisham and Steven Timms MP came along to add to the moment, but really we were trying to connect into our community. So our presentation and the content were full of the gospel but we weren’t overtly evangelistic. It was very much a time of sowing and giving our church greater credibility in the community. I think we achieved that goal.

So in that sense our lesson has been - be strategic and be really clear on what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. My experience of working with churches is that doesn’t always happen; the attitude can be more one of ‘we do it this way, we just preach the Bible’. At King’s we have learned to integrate our approach and package things in a way that links what we’re doing on Sunday with our midweek activities. We want our vision to be grounded in the whole life of the church and we have found it pays to be strategic.