Become a Religious Entrepreneur
Starting a Reformed Church
Opening a Reformed church is your ticket to a rich spiritual life if you have the creativity and tenacity necessary to be a successful religious entrepreneur. We offer tips and advice to give you a jump-start on planning for your church.
Thinking about opening a Reformed church? We tell you what you need to know to get started.
The Reformed Tradition
The Reformed Church is a cluster of Protestant churches that is derived from Calvinism, a sub-stream of the Reformation. Reformed theology is characterized by pre-determinism and other beliefs that are characteristic of churches in the Calvinist tradition.
Like Presbyterianism, Reformed churches are organizationally complex. At the congregational level, elders and deacons form a consistory with representatives from congregations comprising a classis. Regional synods oversee classes and are in turn, subject to the General Synod, the supreme judiciary and assembly in the Reformed church.
The Reformed Church in America is open to multiplication through church planting and has set a goal of planting 400 new churches by 2014. But religious entrepreneurs need to navigate Reformed polity and procedures in order to participate in the RCA's church planting initiatives.
SEO for Reformed Church Plants
It used to be that Reformed church plants only needed to construct a first-rate sign and possibly place an ad in the local paper to create a visible presence in the local community. Although those are still important, today the game also includes raising your church's visibility online.
SEO or search engine optimization is the best way to raise your Reformed church plant's online profile. After you have created a quality website for your church, you will need to implement strategies to make it visible to online users. By generating organic search traffic on Google and other search engines, you can increase the number of people who see your website and consider your new church's ministry offerings.
SEO is also important in raising your visibility with local media. The connection between SEO and PR is often overlooked by religious entrepreneurs. But journalists are just like the rest of us -- they access information online and SEO techniques can increase the likelihood that they will feature your church plant in a local news story.
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