Public relations must be the very center and heart of soul winning if it is to be meaningful to a church program. It involves a great deal more than releasing public information when viewed in this light. Church public relations can be thought of as the church identifying itself with the community, translating the term "love of God" into language the community can understand. It is cultivating the soil into which the seed of truth can be sown. It is the sowing of the seed. It is casting our lot with the community in which our church is situated. We are not to invade as a mighty army and establish claim to so many square feet of space upon which we might legally build. Neither are we to sneak in at night, only to let people discover us when dawn breaks. We must become good neighbors as we establish our church in any given area.
To the people of the community, our doctrine is only as good as we are, or as our love for them might be made manifest. We may be able to give Bible studies with much ability, but this will prove relatively ineffective unless we can reach the heart. However, once we can translate the term "love of God" into language the neighbors can understand, they will be much more responsive and willing to know and do the will of God. They will be able to see and understand the love of God after we have loved them.
In ancient days God's people were geographically located at what was, and still is, known as the crossroads of the world, Palestine. The caravans from the East journeying to Southern Europe and the travelers to North Africa traversed this area and in so doing came in contact with the living God through His people. For no lesser reason He scatters His people today throughout the communities of the world with a command for us to get out of our isolation booths, take off our robes of self-righteousness, and lay them as a "welcome" mat before the open church door. We are to tell the community that we have cast our lot among them.
Some of our churches have wisely identified themselves as the Seventh-day Adventist community church. The connotation of the word community has an irresistible effect. The potential of community friendship and the desire by the church to be identified with the community is tremendous and must be capitalized on through the combined works of all the departments and the total membership of the church. There are a host of ways of doing this, such as making a neighborly call on new residents who have just moved into the neighborhood, reaching the bereaved with messages of condolence, inviting newlyweds who have no church affiliation to accept the welcome of your church and make it their church home, congratulating new parents and offering them a place to begin Christian training for their children.
A tried and successful avenue of approach is to survey the community in order to find the nonchurch children and welcome them to the branch Sabbath school or Sunday school. Add to this our participation and perhaps leadership in other community activities, such as welfare cooperation, temperance activities, civil-defense programs, first-aid and home-nursing classes, and programing for the district, and you have a wide new dimension of true public relations.
Some pastors are capitalizing on a gem of an idea as they prepare a special newsletter, especially geared to the neighborhood, telling of events of general interest happening in the church and announcing programs and activities to come. The newsletter is couched in language of sincere warmth. All these interests when pursued will have tangible effects in terms of converts to the church and will make the people among whom we live more willing to listen when we begin evangelistic campaigns, Bible school enrollment crusades, and other direct approaches.
Inasmuch as true public relations is every-member evangelism, it must be developed and administered on a church-wide plan. The day should be forever past when we look upon public relations as the job of one person submitting an occasional article into the newspapers and clipping the same. That is only one part of a tremendous whole. Parading statistics and facts about ourselves is not nearly so effective as endeavoring to make the love of God so appealing and inviting that people will be drawn into our program.
Some church boards are considering getting through to the community by appointing a public (or community) relations committee, with the pastor as chairman and including the first elder, the head deacon, and department heads as members, and the church public relations secretary as executive secretary. This committee then coordinates the various community approaches as may already fall within the missionary aspects of such departments as home missionary, Sabbath school, MV, temperance, welfare, et cetera. Besides making the individuals involved in these projects responsible to the conference department, the plan also makes them responsible as units of a whole for specific activity in the total church program of community-relations evangelism. The various departments, in addition to reporting to the conference in the chain of command procedure, would also find themselves responsible to the church community-relations committee, who then would coordinate these activities into a unified program of united teamwork. This committee would survey all available avenues of reaching the area in which they are situated, rightly representing and identifying God's church as the light He intended it to be in that place.
It is not our calling to impress the world or ourselves with what we are doing aside from telling the simple sincere story. We have nothing in which to glory save Christ and Him crucified. The world is a lonely place. Behind all the noise and tumult of a jet-propelled twentieth century is an aching void of loneliness and a desire to find identity somewhere in life's complex pattern. Man craves love and sincere interest in his behalf. At this point and no other will we ably and effectively reveal Christ through a personal encounter. This is true public-relations evangelism.
