What People Are Interested In
When someone says, “Tell me about the Mormon Church,” as a general rule, we ought not to tell them what we like about our own church. We often give a doctrinal response—eternal families, modern prophets or scriptures. This makes sense to us because doctrine is the reason why we are in our church instead of in another. Doctrine over time becomes very important to converts, too. But it often is not the initial reason for their interest.
A survey of converts conducted by the Church found what typically attracts people to the Church initially are desires to feel close to God, to experience happiness and peace, and to develop a sense of purpose and direction in life.
If instead we respond with a question like, “It’s a great church. Why do you ask?” we open the door for people to share what’s important to them and possibly a question they have about religion. When we know what’s important to others, we can share something that makes a difference for them. And if they don’t have anything specific in mind, we can talk about one of the three areas most people say appeal to them at first: being close to God, experiencing happiness and peace, and having purpose and direction.
Another way to find what interests people is to look at search patterns online. This list of popular Google searches about religion shows what people are going online to look for most.
Share An Experience With This Principle
Your experience has been posted. Thanks for sharing!
‘; ?>
What happened when you applied this principle?
Please share your experience, along with your name, email and where you’re from, and we’ll post it to the Experiences page. We may even include it in the next edition of the book!
By clicking submit you agree that all submission content is your own experience and that by contributing to everydaymissionaries.org that such contributions become the sole intellectual property of Clayton M. Christensen and the Everyday Missionaries team – as such we reserve the right to use, or not use, all submitted content according to the discretion of the above named parties including, but not limited to, online content, printed material, material for public addresses, email, email and print newsletter.
December 16, 2012 Finding, Principles