When my consulting work began to transition to full-time, I knew that I would be calling and mailing many prospective churches to invite them to seminars. In the past, I had paid the big list rental companies when I needed to contact churches in a given city. I was accustomed to the routine: For a one time use I would pay so many dollars per thousand, plus a set-up charge, plus a charge for labels, plus a charge to ship the labels to me, plus an extra charge if I wanted a copy of the list, plus another charge if I wanted phone numbers.

So I thought, why don't the staff and I just create our own list? It couldn't cost that much, right? We wanted a good list, because these were the churches that we would be mailing and calling. We worked with denominations and associations and vendors. We sent e-mails and faxes and made phone calls. We refined and cross-checked our database. We had over 400,000 churches in our list. We did test mailings. We then processed the entire list through U.S Postal Service CASS software and reduced our list to 350,000 deliverable addresses. Many, many, hours and dollars later we have a great list AND a pile of debt. In hindsight, perhaps it would have been cheaper to just rent the lists a batch at a time from one of the big list rental companies.

So, to reduce our debt and generate a little cash-flow, we've decided to rent our lists out. We don't want this side-business to become a distraction from our core work of consulting churches, so we've created the lists as MS Excel spreadsheets that can be quickly and easily sent to you. We provide lists of all churches in a given state ($100 to $500) or all churches of a given denomination ($200 to $1000) or the entire national list ($2500). We also have one specialty list of 4472 churches with a demonstrated interest (and purchasing record) in church growth related products. Compare our prices and you will see that you can often rent our list for an entire state less expensively than you could rent data for a single city through one of the big services. Plus, our list allows repeated use and includes the Church Name, full mailing address including Zip+4, phone number, and, for over half of our list - a denomination!

We've learned quite a few things about church addresses in the process. Churches are rather unique when compared to other specialty lists. Churches are increasingly mobile. The church that I planted had four different addresses in 18 months, reflecting two different offices and two different worship locations. We've used phone numbers as a key sorting variable to dramatically minimize such duplications. Also, though we are greatly blessed by Freedom of Religion in this country, one consequence of that freedom is that anyone can call themselves a church and once they complete a reader response card and order something they then start working their way into lists of churches. You can make your list very restrictive based on attendance or some other criteria, but then you might miss the newest and fastest growing churches who are the best target market for your product. Every very large list has some “fluff” and every tightly limited list leaves out many legitimate prospects. No balance is perfect. We've chosen the balance that you see reflected in our list.

How do we assign denominational labels? A high percentage of our denominational labels are either self-identified by the congregation or added when cross-checked against a denominational list. Some were added by a text string search, hence a church for which we had no denominational ID was identified as Baptist if the word “baptist” was part of the church name. We realize that there is a risk that a Lutheran congregation named “St. John the Baptist”, if it was not previously identified in our database as “Lutheran”, could be misidentified as Baptist. The percentage of such occurrences has been very low in our experience, but please understand that some such miscodes have slipped through.

TERMS OF RENTAL

Please forgive the following lawyereze. It is a simple reality that not everyone who wishes to sell stuff to churches necessarily holds themselves to a Christian Ethic in their conduct, so we need to protect ourselves.

You are renting the use of a list for the remaining portion of the current calendar year. (Until December 31, 2010)

Your rental fee entitles you to use the contact information as many times as you wish, before the end of the year.

You may NOT retain the list after the year ends, unless you rent the list again for 2011.

You may not share, trade, sell, give, or by other means convey the list to any other party.

You may not post the list on the Internet or through any other means which would make it publicly available.

In order to verify that our lists are being used in accordance with the rental agreement, we have accepted the practice employed by other list renters of including a very small percentage of “dummy” entries which we use to screen for misuse of our list. Generally, less than 1 church per 1000 is such an entry. In general, the only circumstance in which your list would contain a percentage of such addresses greater than 0.1 percent would be if you rented a list with less than 1000 entries.

You must provide us with the name and address from which you will make mailings using this data.

Remedies: If you violate the terms of this agreement by using the list past the expiration, or by sharing, trading, selling, or giving the list away, you are liable for the full retail list cost as many times as the violation has effect. (So, if you post the list online and 20 people download any portion of it, you are liable for the current annual rental price of the list times 20.) SO, DON'T SHARE THE LIST!

You must provide a signed acceptance of these terms before using the data.