Dear Potential
3Circles Church
Community Member,
I’m writing this as a letter, as if it were being delivered
from me to my dearest friend. We do not
believe in such artificial distinctions as Master/Servant or Pastor/Layman.
Jesus said, "Henceforth I call
you not servants; for the servant knows not what the Lord does: but I have called
you friends; for all things that I have heard of the Father I have made known to
you". Thus are we all priests with equal access
to God and God's will for us. The vehicle for
that knowledge is the Holy Spirit, which Jesus said he would leave as his gift to every
believer, guiding each of us to a knowledge of truth by making known to us the Living
WORD of God. All that is required of us, for
that knowledge to be imparted, is to obey his command to "Love one another as I have
loved you" (i.e. living in community, the only effectual way to truly love one another)
and to "Be still and know God", the only effectual way to still this world's voices and
hear the "still small voice" of God. Everyone
who becomes a member of 3Circles Church Communities (3CCC) will likewise be considered
a friend, the degree of our friendship being ultimately determined by the amount of
interaction between us.
Among other things, we are creating a social network. But it is
not like other social networks.
First, we will be providing cutting edge communication tools
that dramatically increase your ability to interact with other 3CCC members, but in
a natural and easy way. There will be no need
to click on special pages to find out who’s online.
Nor will you have to ask for a private chat.
Second, we don’t want the whole world to join. We only want those individuals and
families who are representative of our niche market. This will include people of faith and
spiritual seekers who feel alienated by traditional Church services or
alienated from other religions in which they participated at one time. This means our social network will be
smaller, more personal, and you will share more things in common with all
our members.
Third, unlike all other websites on the Internet, whose only
purpose is to provide information, sell a product, or offer entertainment, our goal, after first gathering like-minded
3CCC members, is to build real-world communities.
To make this happen we must find people who understand our
mission, who find us and our online community genuinely likable, and who are
willing to help us in any way possible to fulfill that
mission. This means we only want to attract people
willing to commit to our community by signing up as members.
Please, do yourself a favor and check out our link to
“The Benefits” page as
well as our sign up page,
where I list additional monetary and non-monetary benefits showing why our membership fee
is such a great deal. You’ll find an amazing
number of benefits that have the potential to dramatically improve your quality
of life, as well as offering unparalleled opportunities for you and your
children.
So, how do you
commit to 3CCC and our mission?
1) Ideally,
you will read over our website and make a decision to join us today.
Just click on "Membership Types And Signup"
on the right hand menu, under "Links of Discovery".
2) For
those who need more time, please bookmark our website and come back often, reading
everything you can several times.
3) For
those who don’t sign up today, I suggest you make a note on your calendar one
day shy of three weeks from today, and write: “JOIN 3CCC”. We give you three weeks from when you first entered your name
and email address for more info on 3Circles Church Communities, to sign up as a 3CCC member.
The different types of membership and how the money from
each membership is distributed towards the furtherance of our 3CCC Mission is covered under the
menu item: "Membership Types And Signup".
That's where we also discuss why we charge a membership fee
and how we distribute that fee towards the fulfillment of God's vision for 3Circles Church Communities.
4) We
don’t want fence-sitters and we don’t want people who are always looking for
something for nothing. Those two go
hand-in-hand, being largely responsible for the dramatic decline in response to messages on social
and business networks. Over the past
three years we have seen responses to our offers on business networks go from 3,400
the first year (the year business networks started) to 437 the second year to
about 45 this past year (these numbers are for an equal 3 week period and for a
different product or service each year; we used the same identical formula for
business building each time). It’s
gotten so bad that most emails are deleted without looking at the offer. So we're using a hybrid approach that
includes online marketing as well as old-school direct marketing techniques.
Direct marketing via high quality postcards still provides
a solid track record of response percentages. For our online
marketing we'll still be using Search Engine Optimization, keywords, metatags, etc., but after seeing
how Google and other search engines continually change the rules (destroying the revenues of many a
small business overnight) we decided the hybrid approach is best.
Either you join because you understand our mission to build online and offline faith-based communities via
our “Spirit-Centered Revolution”, or you don’t. Why waste our time
trying to convince people who don't understand, when there are so many who do?
According to Barna Research, there are tens of millions of people dissatisifed with traditional church, who are
looking for ways to better their debt-ridden, stress filled lives.
If we followed the crowd we would offer our services for free; we
would try to get as many people to join as possible rather than seek a targeted niche market; we would use
website tools that showed all the people joining under you, giving you a false sense of growth; we would include
so many free ebooks and other incentives in our offer that you'd end up confused about our mission; and we would
offer up all the same hype. But that's precisely what NOT to do.
My 12 years of Internet experience, both as an Internet Services Provider
providing dialup access and web hosting services and as an Internet marketer, reveal this truth, that the vast
majority of internet startups fail precisely because their offers have become hopelessly redundant, are percieved as
being worth little precisely because they are free, and they create no real community because they try to be all
things to all people rather than reach a targeted niche market.
5) We
believe that with the constant inundation of information and Internet
solicitations, not to mention the tendency for most of us to over extend our
time schedules, we must do more than simply ask people to sign up as
members. The success of our online and offline communities
will depend mostly on the message and principles God has given me. But it will
also depend, at least to some degree, on our members believing they are getting more than the value
they spend for membership. And since this is a community, the ultimate success
of 3Circles Church Communities is really determined by our member's, by their loyalty and commitment to our cause.
For these reasons, we ask potential members to make their decision within three weeks and then reinforce that decision
by signing our “3CCC Covenant Agreement”.
BECOME
A MEMBER TODAY (this links to our “3CCC Covenant Agreement” which you’ll “sign” by
typing in your name and checking the checkbox; once you click “Submit” you’ll
be taken to the payment page).
Sincerely Yours,
Leroy & Vonda Grey
