Church Marketing - Seriously

In my previous post I noted a cartoon about church marketing. I also posted this to our church's forum, and the question of why this was so close to home came up. I've been doing some thinking about this, and here are some random observations.

Marketing? Can that be Christian?

Most people think of "marketing" in a secular sense, and it seems somehow foreign to church, in that trying too hard at marketing may be a "bad thing" and not Christian. But I think Paul was all about marketing. 1 Corinthians 9 comes to mind:

I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some.
I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Do you not know that in a race all the runners run, but only one gets the prize?
Run in such a way as to get the prize.

That sounds like "good marketing". Its the basis of the Great Commission too, isn't it?

So why do we Christians feel somehow "guilty" about good marketing?

Equipped?

There's a whole webiste and blog devoted to (bad) church marketing. This web site and the cartoon say a lot about equipping in our church. A marketing firm is full of trained, experienced marketing people. In church, we look for volunteers. Maybe the volunteers know how to do marketing; maybe they don't. I don't think its an issue of a church recruiting trained marketing people, its an issue of making sure the people who volunteer are properly trained and equipped.

Again, Paul is all over this - look at the next verse of the 1 Corinthians 9 passage mentioned above:

Everyone who competes in the games goes into strict training.

When we talk about "equipping disciples" in church, its easy to imagine "churchy" things, like Bible studies, etc. But equipping in areas like marketing, outreach (and technology) can be, and should be, just as important.

Time? I don't Have Time!

I recently stumbled across a post in Tony Morgan's blog describing an article in Men's Health about volunteering. I don't read Mens' Health, and I couldn't find any information on their web site, so I'm going on the data from Tony Morgan's post, but here are some figures:

• Women are more likely than men to volunteer.
• 32% of women serve in some volunteer capacity compared to 25% of men.
• Working mothers are the most active as volunteers.
• Busy people are more likely to volunteer.

The interesting one to me is the last one. I think this is some indicator of the old 80/20 rule, that 80% of the work is done by 20% of the people. So with the same people doing things, are we maximizing our resources?

And those 20% are already busy according to the survey. I know a common refrain heard around our church is "I'm so busy, I just don't have time!" I can hardly argue with that - balancing work and family is hard enough, let alone church. But is it easier sometimes to just say you don't have time for something rather than making a sacrifice for Christ?

I'm reminded of the "Cost of Following Jesus" passage in Luke 9. For the longest time I wondered how I would react if I was asked to leave everything behind to follow - I always imagined it as some "big moment"; but I came to understand that this applies to even the littlest things and in the smallest of moments, like making extra time to do something for discipleship. Discipleship ain't easy.


I don't mean for this to be any kind of slam on people doing marketing, especially in our church. I think we are trying, and are succeeding in areas. But I'd like to think there's always room for doing better.

Here are some interesting church web sites, for example, and some interesting uses of billboards.

Church Marketing

I recently came across this cartoon about church marketing (click on the cartoon to enlarge)

The cartoon is courtesy of Cartoon Church.com.

While I'm not sure its entirely accurate, I think there's probably some amount of truth to it ;-)

Tower of Video

Blogger just introduced a new featured called the Video Bar. It allows you to specify a search for video from Google Video and YouTube, and will show a small tower of video links which will play at the top of your blog when clicked.

I put this in my blog as an experiment - it searches for "Church Outreach" and "web2.0" - I'm got to see if this shows up anything interesting. Since I can't necessarily control what shows up from those searches I'll have to apologize in advance if something "bad" happens to show up.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

I recently came across this interesting illustration of web 2.0, from Professor Michael Wesch from the Kansas State Cultural Anthropology Department.

(full size version from YouTube is here)



Its one of the most powerful (and dizzying) explanations of the current state of the web. If you've been around the web for a while, its easy to stay stuck in the past, and think of static web sites that are controlled by others. This video shows that the power and content of both reading and publishing lie with all of its participants.

Two things come to mind when I think of church outreach

1) the possibilities of sheer numbers for outreached (his video has reached over 1.7 million viewers)
2) the opportunities to boost ministries through information sharing and collaboration.

I'm trying in my own way to help the cause at our church, through this blog, use of del.icio.us, flickr, and ways of consolidating feeds into manageable content. I'm finding that the more I read, the more I find, and the more I need to read.