The arrangement of the program may look like a small item, but it’s one of those little items, which, taken along with others, makes a big difference. Reports and records of the treasurer and of other workers in the church are important. Our attitude toward strangers when they visit our meetings is significant. That’s one respect in which the Chapel Avenue congregation is outstanding. Your courtesy to strangers has caused much favorable comment.
6. _Advertising the work of the church._ I’ve known churches to spend three or four hundred dollars to get a preacher, and refuse to spend $25 to get the people there to hear him. Think about that! You know the preacher can’t do any good unless the people are there. I went to a certain city in West Virginia to hold a meeting, and I wrote to them in advance urging them to advertise the meeting. Well, I couldn’t say too much, you know. They’d think I was trying to get them to advertise me. After I arrived I asked them if they’d advertised the meeting. They said, “Oh, yes.” I looked around for a sign but I didn’t see one. The church building was located on a through highway that ran from the North to the South. A streamer across the road would have attracted the attention of everybody who passed. They hadn’t put one up. I looked in the store windows and saw no ads. I saw none anywhere.
I decided to find out whether they had advertised the meeting. It was a small town where everybody is supposed to know what everybody else is doing anyway—only about 1,000 people. I went to the stores and inquired whether a meeting was going on in town. In every store I entered I was thoroughly informed about a Nazarene meeting. One fellow got so enthusiastic that he took me out on the street and showed me the preacher’s house and told me where they were holding the meeting. After they would finish their story I’d always ask if there were any other meetings going on in town. In each case the answer was, “No.”
In our meeting that night I related my experiment and its results. And I said, “Now, don’t think I told those people any better. I thought I’d help you keep the secret!” That’s the principle on which a great many churches work.
Remember that you have not advertised the work of the church when you merely let people know it’s going on. You haven’t advertised it until you _make them want a part in it_! Everybody in this country knows that the Standard Oil Company has gasoline for sale. If that were the end of advertising, they could discontinue theirs. But that’s not the purpose of it. Their purpose is to make people _want_ Standard gasoline, so they keep on advertising. Too often we think we’ve advertised the church just because people know it’s in existence, but we have not advertised it until we make them want a part in it.