Logo for MallChurch … a church inside a mall.

Are we supposed to “market” the church?

Just the initial thought of that is so repulsive. For some reason, when I think of marketing, I think of “flash but little substance.” Things with substance are supposed to market themselves right? We don’t need a smooth talker to “sell” the gospel message. We don’t need fancy ads or great graphic design in order to make the gospel appealing to people. It appeals to the consumerism of our culture. How are we supposed to teach our people that they should not have a consumer mentality with church when we feed that consumer mentality?

Here’s a quote from the website Church Marketing Sucks:

“We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause.”

The website helps churches to market themselves, do advertising, networking, public relations, branding and identity.

Consumer Oriented Society

The problem that churches are facing is that because we’re in such a consumer oriented society, Christians and non-Christians alike feel that they need things to be marketed to them. They don’t seek and find out good churches. They sit back, take it easy and wait for good churches to find them. We go church hopping and evaluate each church based on what it has to offer. We look at how old school looking the banners are. We listen to the preaching to see if it’s dynamic or not. Basically we try to see based on one service what the church is all about.

The Need for Branding

The only way that a church can convey its mission, sense of community, and spirituality through one service, is through strong branding. The logo, sermon, mottos, t-shirts that the pastor wears, and words that the congregation members say, all have to jive with one another. If something is out of place, we get a mixed message. Every fellowship needs to contribute to the church brand. The brand needs to be different from the next church. Otherwise if we’re a non-Christian, we might never come back to church. If we’re a Christian, we go to another church.

Death Through Attrition

This church planting article talks about how to “walk people through the door” and that every church needs an active plan to get more people to walk through the door otherwise the church will eventually die due to church attrition. In otherwords, advertise, network, market, otherwise you will die. The article argues that every year the church will lose 3-5% of its members due to attrition. Basically people die or move away. So if the church gets a few new members every year, it stays afloat. It has to do even better than that in order to grow. Churches are no longer prominent on the street corners of large intersections. They don’t have a natural draw. Christians don’t even have to attend church anymore to consider themselves Christian.

Church marketing is just a fact of life for churches. Even house churches or organic churches have to market… they do it through extensive networking. They must do it or die. That’s unfortunate, because I do think it teaches us the wrong message about consumerism.