Anyone had to build an audience from scratch?

The thing is not only you, most of other DJ’s if they only just focus to this one genre will find the same situation like you are.
I have a good friend of mine floating the same boat as you are,
His genre is, welp you guessed it, its “Trance”, thats his love and soul, he told me he cries when he listened to Trance (*chuckle tryin to keep my face straight when he was telling me this), he REFUSED to play anything but “Trance”
Well, we all know it the genre is pretty much dead (*dodged Trance fans), the Trance scene is pretty much is a dying breed, no local clubs in their right mind would hired a DJ that spin Trance nor have any some kind of event related to Trance
SO in order for him to keeps playin at the club, IS to switched his genre, multi-format genre, and yeap you guessed it, he REFUSED. He settles just makin some mixtapes and podcast it and stuff.
There is really no wrong or right in here, you just need to asked yourself what is it that you wanted ?
Me? the simple reason i still love DJing is to experience that blood rush when the crowds cheers and dance to MY DJing, regardless what typed of music i spin

The key is that online media comes LATER.
You cannot go to youtube and soundcloud and just ask people to like you. Most of the time they heard that 2000 times a day (why I am not answering Facebook or Soundcloud PMs… my Inbox there has prolly 1000s of messages already…. the counter is actually no longer working…)

If you want to build a scene you have to start local. Get a loyal group of followers and promote yourself.
There are tons of articles on the main site here, most of them by D-Jam which are absolutely awesome.

Bottom line however it is HARD, TIRESOME, it will take a long time and it will take EFFORT and MOTIVATION to do it.

Take the first step and put some EFFORT in searching for the main articles on the site 😉

It seems your problem is two-pronged, a) you are general DJ in that you play multiple genres, of which there are plenty about and b) you limit yourself to what I will call “suitable christian tracks” of which only a smaller portion of the population knows the existence and – by your own words – they don’t even know they have the need.

You are not gonna get the average audience to come to your gigs as there is just soo much alternatives if your night life is not limited by going only to places that fit in with your christian life style.

I think it has to be an inside out approach. Organise a dance evening in cooperation with the church/ministery/youth organisation and have them help promote it. From there you can start expanding. During your first event(s) be sure to invite key people from other churches or organisations you feel you would like to work with. Let them experience first hand what it is you are trying to accomplish.

I respect your zeal and I hope you will find the right information and motivation to go in the direction you want and make a succes of it.

Also a huge tip and how I got a great following when I started getting bigger (end of 90s):
I not only gave out my card, but I also asked everyone to put their Email on a for I provided. I had a nice clipboard with a pen on it, so it was easy and fast for everyone to do. Not only did I have such a clipboard in my booth but also on the main bar (if the venue allowed it) and gave one to the bouncers at the entrance (which were easily befriended with some beer etc.).