Salted Caramel Church

You’ve probably noticed that salted caramel is a trendy flavor. I’ve been seeing it for a couple of years, and last week saw a billboard advertising a salted caramel shake at a fast food restaurant. They are clearly updating their product offerings to keep and attract people. Does that last phrase apply to your church? Do you regularly change your offerings to keep and attract people? I’m not suggesting that you offer anything with salted caramel at your church, but here are 3 observations to consider:

• “Innovation” isn’t always necessary, but change is. The fast food restaurant didn’t create the salted caramel trend. They simply followed it, but in doing so they made a change to their menu to draw people in.
• Small experiments precede public changes. Long before putting up a billboard, the fast food restaurant conducted multiple experiments. They tried different formulations in a taste-testing kitchen. They offered the shakes in a few locations to see how customers would react. Then they launched nationally.
• New doesn’t stay new forever. I can almost guarantee that salted caramel shakes won’t be on the menu of this fast food restaurant in 2 or 3 years. Something new will take its place. When interest begins to decline, the company will pull the plug.

There’s one big difference between the restaurant and your church. The addition of the salted caramel shake is unlikely to offend any of their existing customers. Unfortunately, that can’t be said of innovations in churches. But that doesn’t mean that ministry leaders shouldn’t try new things. It just means that they need to be shrewd innovators. It’s easy to receive my blogs by email. Just sign-up on Feedburner by clicking here.]]>