A question often asked is, “Why is it that so many people visit our church just once?”  The usual pat answer is:  “Sub-standard mediumship!”  This is a common response from church officials, since it is someone else's problem.  Nothing we can do about it.  We are not responsible.  And so we aren't - up to a point. 

But what about churches that don't have mediumship as a feature - or as a scapegoat?  How do evangelical churches, for instance, get people to come week after week - and bring their friends - their relatives - even their children, without any mediumship at all on offer?  And how do they grow exponentially to the point where they can support a full-time paid leader within five years from start-up?  Are we missing something somewhere?

 

For starters, do we ever look at ourselves and ask, what about sub-standard addresses, sub-standard chairmanship, sub-standard welcome, sub-standard information, sub-standard communication, sub-standard programme, sub-standard musical accompaniment, sub-standard refreshments, etc?  If we ever do, we will find a whole raft of things we can do to make them come back a second time - and time and time again.

 

The trouble is that, having discovered mediumship, we think it is so wonderful that nothing else matters.   Well, it does!  If you want to run a successful and growing church, that is.  Unfortunately, we have bet the ranch on mediumship and neglected everything else – including our teachings.

It would be fine if we could guarantee a high standard of mediumship every week.  But we know that mediumship is a variable commodity - which is something the newcomer does not know and upon which he will make his judgement accordingly.  Hence, that all-important second visit does not happen.  The fact is that we have failed to provide a 'quality experience' for him in other areas, too.

 

The medium does his or her best to create a quality experience.  The committee often leave that to her (or him) and just run things in the background.  Too often, all the committee do is to look important, knowledgeable and rather pleased with themselves.  Not all of them, of course, but rather too many.  And the figures show it.   The collective result of this is that SNU church membership has been going down for many years.  The lowest figure in our history was 10,250 back in 1941.  The second lowest is the 2014 figure just published -  11,185.  This is a huge drop of 13% from the previous year’s figure of 12,904!

Before we cheer things up, here is another sad statistic.  When I carried out an analysis of churches in my own district in 2010, I found that from a membership a whisker under 1,200, attendance was only 700.  Even our members, it seems, do not much enjoy their church.  They, too, need a ‘quality experience’ to keep them interested.  And, by and large, they are not getting it.  The 2014 membership in my own District – just four years later – has fallen from that 1,200 to just 841.  Are we awake yet???

The problem is not just sub-standard mediumship.  Nor is it Stansted’s inability to wave a magic wand.  It is in our churches!  In the main, they are badly run, too small and need to G-R-R-R-R-O-W!!!  Small churches are small because not many people go to them.  That is nothing to be proud of.

Yet It is not difficult to turn a church around and – between us – to pull our Movement out of the present nose-dive.  It is just a matter of giving those who attend our churches a ‘quality experience’.  And following up with a church strategy, which is beyond the scope of this article.

Below are ten tactics to do this.  These tactics are just that and are not exhaustive.  Without a strategy – and some enterprise and initiative - they will not by themselves produce a sustainable recovery.  But they will enable you to get quick results and open the minds of the doubters as to the possibilities for your church’s future.  They will give you an initial boost on which to build.

Try some of these for a start.

1.  Produce a church brochure, on a single sheet of A4 in a tri-fold format.  Tell your story, the history, the personalities, etc, along with a listing of the activities.  This is the first of the ‘micro conversions’ (m-c’s) that help them bond with the church and, together with other touches, help create a ‘quality experience’.  

2. Nominate a host – an outgoing person who is good with people.  His or her job is to conduct newcomers to a seat.   They may feel more comfortable towards the back of the hall if it is their first visit and the host can empathise with the visitor if he recognises that.   Handing a pamphlet or brochure to them at this point enables them to engage with visitors.   Several m-c’s here.

3. Pamphlets to whet the appetite.  Don’t just treat people as potential message junkies, then complain that your people are only interested in messages!  What people want when starting a new interest is information.   Ensure you have a rack of pamphlets at the back of your church.  Do not put them on the table where you stack your hymn books as they have not got time to browse when they are entering or leaving.  Put them at the back, printed on pink, blue, yellow, gold and green paper, as this creates a colourful display which will draw immediate attention to them.  You will find articles you can use – all by recognised authors and previously published in Spiritualist magazines - at the following web address:  www.anytown-spiritualist-church.org.uk/articles.html .  Just copy and paste them onto a Word document and print in ‘booklet’ format which will come out at A5 size.  Paste the copy onto your own website, too, if you have one.  (Just remember to retain the acknowledgements of author and original publisher.)  The SNU range of glossy colour leaflets should also feature.

4. Avoid ‘Dead air’.   Silence in a Spiritualist church before the service is a turn-off.  And it is unachievable since Spiritualists will always talk and committees will always complain of the ‘unspiritual’ noise before the service.  The cure for this has recently been the utterly useless piece of pseudo-religious window dressing known as the ‘one minute meditation’.  Another cure:  use music.  If you have any sort of sound system, you can access the most beautiful music in the world by the leading artists of the world – use it.  For half an hour pre-service use mainly instrumental tracks; words can get in the way.  Lollipops – short, classical pieces of less than three minutes – which make people say to themselves “I’m not keen on classics, but I love this one.”  Again, you will find a list of these on www.anytown-spiritualist-church.org.uk/music.html.  Once the speaker and chairperson are ready, slowly turn down the volume to signal the start of the service.  No need for them to fight against the chatter.

5. Be diverse in musical accompaniment.   A 100% diet of hymns will attract a mainly elderly audience, with relatively deep pockets, but they will bring little energy to the church.  Use 100% pop songs and you will attract a young audience, with lots of energy and enterprise – but no money!   Pop music, if not handled selectively, can also make us look shallow to those ‘thoughtful people’ we are trying to attract.  A diverse church – mixed in age, social class, race, etc – is a healthy church.  Arrange the music accordingly.   If a church is healthy, it grows.  And that is our main task.

6. Chairperson.  The importance of this role is often underestimated.  Many people just go through the tick-box motions.  The chairperson needs to be able to engage with an audience; to lift the service;  to ‘sell’ the events when presenting – not just reading – the announcements.  S/he needs to humanise the next week’s speaker – where they are travelling from, and how long they have been coming to Anytown Spiritualist Church, recent publicity around them, etc.  S/he needs to be able to project herself, be spontaneous, use appropriate humour and be a welcoming face of the church.  People with sales experience are ideal.  And if you have anyone who has had stage experience, so much the better.  Head up and speak up.  It’s no job for an introvert or a mumbler.

7. Communicate.  In the age of the internet, this is so easy, but why are so few people taking advantage of these wonderful opportunities?  A Facebook page.  A Newsletter.  Email.  A church website.  Being communicated with makes visitors - and members– feel much more a part of the church.  This is how you build your church as a community, rather than just a now-and-then audience.  All these are m-c’s – little micro-conversions that all add up to give a ‘quality experience’ to the visitor – and keeps the regulars on board.

8. Socialise.   Make sure you offer tea and coffee after the service.  Many have travelled far.  The cost difference per cup between budget tea and premium tea is miniscule, but the result is yet another m-c.  A worked example:  charge 50p for a cup of cheap instant coffee that people increasingly dislike:  cost, about 10p, profit 40p.  An 18p Rombouts coffee filter will bring the cost to 28p.  Charge £1 for this real coffee option and the profit is 72p – and a much more satisfied customer enjoying part of a ‘quality experience’.  Make sure committee members – and ordinary members – talk to newcomers.  Introduce them to each other.  You need to be a welcoming church, not just a welcoming committee.

9. Attracting Youth.  If you can attract young people – and get them to stay – they become Contributors to Spiritualism, rather than Consumers of it.  Then you have a future.  Even more so if you can sustain a real Childrens’ Lyceum.  You need attendance of at least one hundred to do that.  This is by no means impossible and should be a goal for smaller churches.  Just use ‘possibility thinking’ rather than ‘impossibility thinking’.  Both are self-fulfilling prophesies!  What attracts all age groups to a church is the E-N-E-R-G-Y they get from the services.  (This also creates a great atmosphere for mediumship.)  Do give youth their head in some areas without pandering to them.  For example, once a month, let the younger members run an “After Eight” session, following the service on the first Sunday of the month.  DVDs, discussions, etc, it is up to them and they can open it to all or keep it to themselves.  And as with all your members, consult them regularly about changes you are planning.  That way, rather than becoming an secretive and remote committee, you create a community of participants.  In a mature democracy, nobody gets everything they want.  But everybody gets enough to want to stay.

10. Use ‘Smart’ advertising.  If you advertise in the local press for newcomers, promote ideas rather than visiting mediums.  Only your members know the merits or de-merits of Mrs Miggins on Sunday and Mrs Muggins on Tuesday, so we are basically talking to ourselves – and paying local papers dearly for it.  There are cheaper ways of doing it.   State the time of your Sunday service and then a sub-headline, such as: “10 Things you should know about Spiritualism” with a weblink:  www.yourtown-spiritualist-church.org.uk/10spi.html.  This will pique the interest of that huge constituency of people who are fascinated by Spiritualism, but haven’t yet visited us, and provide an unthreatening space in which they can find out about us.  At the same time, it demonstrates from the beginning that we are not just about messages and prepares them for our pamphlet stand.  That’s smart advertising – and smart church building!  (The Anytown website contains many suitable articles with enticing titles that you can use in your advertising.)

There is, after all, a huge surge of interest in Spiritualism.  The England and Wales census of 2001 showed that 32,000 people called themselves Spiritualists.  By 2011 this had shot up to 39,000.  This can only be explained by the innovation of TV mediumship, since church membership went down by 9% over the same period.  

Why aren’t we capitalising on this TV exposure the way we did when Doris Stokes dramatically enlarged our public profile in the 1980s?  She took our membership numbers to over 19,395 by 1985 – an all-time high.  

To a point we are getting a pay-off from TV mediums.  Having declined by only 9% in ten years is something of a result when compared with the 13% drop in the one year just past.

Many of the latest batch of TV Spiritualists will have tried our churches and, the figures suggest, will have found them wanting.  This is where the problems are and nobody is addressing the failures at church level.  But with the right creative tactics – and an overarching vision - thousands of new Spiritualists are available to us.

So there you are.  Ten things a switched-on committee, with the X-factor, can do to increase attendance and retention.  Without relying on mediumship at all.  And showing we don’t have to be the one-trick pony we seem to have made of ourselves.   We can broaden our appeal very easily, with a little effort and creativity.

There is much more to the subject of church growth than this article can cover.  Small churches that are too close together are the biggest challenge our movement faces.  Each is ill-equipped to run itself properly, let alone compete with orthodoxy, but perfectly equipped to compete with its fellow Spiritualist churches.  Talk about a circular firing squad!

As long as this dysfunctionality continues, we will stay on the road to our own demise.   We need a New Model of Spiritualist church – and a new way of thinking.  We churches need to ‘up’ our game!

None of this, however, means we should ignore sub-standard mediumship.

First published in ‘Psychic World’.