I just got off the phone.
I talked with some young lady from "Such and Such Exciting and Fantastic Terrifically Great and Awesome Youth Ministry" from out in Texas. She asked me with a cheerleader-esque bounce in her voice, "Do you have a youth ministry?" (My initial thought was, "No, but the Lord does...")
I answered in the affirmative and then she proceeded to ask, "How many do you have?" (I wanted to say "How many youth ministries?" or "How many young people attend?") I answered that we typically have about four or five teenagers.
Insert sigh of resignation..."Oh, well, thank you sir."
And then she hung up! The call lasted less than thirty seconds. No explanation for her call. No reason why she called this little church in western North Carolina from the BIG state of Texas. Was she conducting a stupid survey? Does she work for George Gallup? What?
Evidently churches who minister in the diminutive do not count in their economy.
Argh!
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9 comments:
hahahahahahaha,
I needed a good chuckle. All of the telemarketers seem to wait until our secretary leaves, and then I answer the phone. I'm getting caller ID and I can guarantee you that I WILL be screening those calls out.
But seriously, our smaller churches are ignored to a degree. Seems that people either want or money or nothing. Heh, perhaps she was totally new at this telemarketing and just made a major booboo. At least you were off the phone in 30 seconds. It takes me at least 2 minutes to get rid of them unless I am in the rude mood in which case, I just hang up on 'em.
Hope your day gets better.
Heh.
My day has been fine, notwithstanding the anonymous caller from TX.
I can hang up on telemarketers at home, but can't seem to bring myself to do it at the church office. I know they have a job to do and I try not to be so rude and when I have time I try to hear them out. It seems like that is charitable and would make their days easier. I have never known someone who does telemarketing for a living, but I can imagine after you get hung up on eighty times a day you might struggle with relevance and significance.
But then, I know telemarketing must work because we get so many phone calls of this nature. Somebody must be buying what they are selling, else they would not keep calling!
I had a telemarketer get downright rude with me a couple of weeks ago when I told them that company had already called me and I said no. He proceeded to tell me that it may be the same service provided by a company with the same name, but it was indeed a different company. I told him his company needed to change their name then.
That said, I guess we little churches just don't matter a whole lot, huh.
You could have told her that you have 4 or 5, but if you combined with another church in the area (Crossroads), it goes up to almost 10, and ask if that was better. :P
When did our youth group triple???
(This is more than a bit discouraging, since I am personally much more the face of "the youth ministry" at Crossroads than Tony is at GV, but let's just bear with the circumstances....)
Words fail me. My disgust with the "numbers" racket have progressively and increasingly grown over the past several years.
I am a pastor of a small church also. We are so small that we don't even have a phone and it is located in an area that has no community. You know, church growth gurus would pull out their hairplugs on us.
Heh. Thanks for signing on, Jeff. The church growth guys certainly don't know what to do with eighty percent of our churches. :)
I do become frustrated with small churches. We tend to close in on ourselves because we're terrified of growth.
However, I become very frustrated with big church gooks that consider "us" to be less spiritual than they...
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