Spotlight: All People’s Church, Brampton ON

God is the God of all people.  Jesus died for all people, no matter their race, cultural background, language, economic situation, or any other distinction.  So, the church’s work is to reach out to all people, but this is not an easy task.  How do you connect to the people of an area when their cultural perspective and even their language may differ?  It’s not easy, but some church’s are taking on the challenge.

All People’s Church:
As their name suggests, All People’s Church in Brampton, Ontario, Canada is one of those churches who have taken on the challenge or reaching all people.  I first connected with Jonathan Gallo about a year ago.  Pastor Gallo explained the vision of All People’s Church and I was excited to be able to partner with a church that was taking on the multi ethnic challenge.

I’ll let Pastor Gallo tell you a bit about All People’s Church:

“All People’s Church is a multi ethnic charismatic evangelical church of 500. We have been around since 1968 and have served Brampton, a sister city to Toronto.  Our city is 1) very religious – a city of mosques, temple’s, and 100 churches; 2) the fastest growing city in Canada – currently 450,000 people representing over 110 different ethnicities.  As we surveyed the landscape, a variety of problems to us for evangelism presented themselves, however, an opportunity to grow also presented itself to us.  We realized that if our city is growing at a rate of 25,000 per year and 20% of people were from Christian backgrounds, many would be looking for a new church to become a part of.”

Common Ground – The Internet:
As I’ve mentioned it’s quite a challenge to try to reach such a wide variety of people.  However, one thing that most of the people have in common, no matter what their cultural background, is that they use the Internet to find things.  So, having an compelling website and being very visible in the search engines is a very effective way to reach people.

All People’s Church already had a very good website.  So, they needed to be more visible online so that compelling website would be truly effective.  So, they sought to partner with OurChurch.Com to help with their search engine visibility.  Here’s what their experience has been according to Pastor Gallo:

“Gone are the days of advertising in the newspaper (which we did at an annual cost of 4500 for 3 years with no return) or the yellow pages.  It’s why we turned to ourchurch.com to help us with search rankings.  Well, that was the best money we ever spent.  In the first year, I can count between 40-50 new people who joined our church because they visited our website and we were found first.  Thank you Ourchurch.com.”

Real-World Results:
Did you get that?  40-50 new members through the search engines in just the first year.  I’ve written before about churches getting high rankings and being listed all over the web, but what I love even more is seeing those real-world results.  Actual people, physically visiting the church, and making the church their home.  Those are real lives being ministered to for Christ.

If you are in the Brampton area, I encourage you to visit All People’s Church.  If you are a church interested in reaching a multi-ethnic community, it might be worth dropping a line to Pastor Gallo and finding out what their church is doing to reach their community.