Case Study
Holy Family Episcopal Church is a small congregation in south-central New Jersey near Philadelphia. The parish was officially formed in January 2018 when the Church of the Atonement, Laurel Springs, and the Church of St. John in the Wilderness, Gibbsboro, decided to dissolve their separate congregations and form a new, joint parish. At the beginning of 2022 the average Sunday attendance was in the high teens, but today it is in the low to mid-thirties.
The kinds of initiatives that have been most effective at Holy Family involve both technological and in-person engagements. For example, the community is intentional about hosting events beyond the typical Sunday morning Eucharist celebration. They hosted a Blessing of the Animals in October, a Halloween Hospitality event that combined elements of All Saints (for example, lighting a candle for lost loved one), and an ongoing community meal ministry that offers free lunch on the first Friday of the month. In addition to these and other nonEucharistic events, the community does more typical church gatherings—Bible study (“God Talk”) and Messy Church for young people.
The critical aspect of the church’s use of these events is not necessarily in simply hosting them but in how they host them and what they do after these events. Creating a connection and contact point with newcomers and visitors is an obvious first step, and Holy Family maintains a Covid sign- in that is an important way of gathering contact information. With this contact information, the church can provide updates about ongoing events through technological means (including a text-update service that has seen very few “opt-outs” from its distribution list). Furthermore, the congregation and its leadership have a focus on “quality interactions” with newcomers and visitors: rather than bombarding new faces with the entire congregation introducing themselves before or after the service, members seek to create a quality introduction and deeper initial contact with those people. These soft-touch approaches combined with quality engagement work well in this part of the country, a region where a small Episcopal church can be found in almost every square-mile-town.
Holy Family also makes great use of Facebook to spur further engagement. The parish’s Facebook page is an unofficial landing page and the location of typical announcements from parish leadership and members. Beyond the standard categories of parish-Facebook activity (announcing future events, important life updates of members and leaders, and sermons), Holy Family also creates a large amount of original content. One of the lay leaders, Betsy Murphy, pulls quotes and ideas from the Sunday sermon to create a regular meme that the parish posts on its page. These memes are neither flashy nor complex, but they help to provide visitors to the Facebook page with a sense of the parish vibe— allowing people to experience the community’s culture prior to showing up in person. For a church whose Facebook page has 314 followers (as of this writing), these regular postings also provide further contact points with the broader community and create a greater sense of familiarity over time. Further Facebook activity includes both paid advertisements targeting their geographic area and manual parish advertising on the Facebook pages of townships within a reasonable driving distance. Though church leadership has found the paid advertisements to be ineffective (with the exception of Messy Church ads), several visitors have reported seeing the announcements parish leaders made to local township Facebook pages for specific events.