Church Marketing Sucks
September 9th, 2004 Posted in God, Church & Stuff
(from the About page of the Church Marketing Sucks blog, a project I’ve been working on for a few months that just went public:)
Frustrate.
Something’s wrong with your church. Something’s wrong with the Church. Church marketing efforts and communication in general suck. We’ve got the greatest story ever told, but no one’s listening. The church has a problem communicating, and it’s time to change.
Educate.
We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause. But snazzy marketing won’t save this ship, either. It’s not about being perfect, but there’s a better way to communicate. It’s authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell.
Motivate.
This isn’t simply about putting butts in pews or selling glossy postcards. It’s about helping the church be the Church, and seeing lives changed as a result. If helping the church communicate better allows one person to finally glimpse the Gospel, then our work has been worthwhile. It may be fuzzy math, but God can worry about that.
Celebrating my 30th birthday with clean water and a clean shave.
3 Responses to “Church Marketing Sucks”
By cheney on Sep 10, 2004
SO BRILLIANT.
“We love the church, but it needs some help. Typos, cheesy logos, and bad clip art aren’t helping the cause. But snazzy marketing won’t save this ship, either. It’s not about being perfect, but there’s a better way to communicate. It’s authentic, it’s loving, and it knows how to spell.”
So absolutely true it’s not funny. My old church’s bulletins are not only ridden with typos, but Random Capitalization and just a lack of format. Sometimes, things are randomly bold. Sometimes there are unneeded quotes. Sometimes things are spaced, and not. I think they must TRY to make it as random and inconsistent and hard to read as they can. These are not mistakes. These are deliberate things, like bolding and excess (weird) punctuation.
And generally, I have the feeling that if I mentioned this to a certain type of people, they would say it doesn’t matter, that’s a superficial thing to worry about, and not to be so nitpicky.
But it’s not superficial to me. It’s important because it’s simple and people should know better. If THEY don’t, someone should be proofreading and then that person would know better. It’s horribly distracting to someone who likes English and spelling and layout of things to sit there and mentally correct all the errors and wince at the atrocity that is the bulletin. One or two errors now and then, fine. When the whole thing is a mockery of the English language…ouch.
By The stuff in my head. on Sep 10, 2004
Church Marketing Sucks
Amen. We’ve been discussing “marketing” at bluer and how we can authentically present bluer (I hate to say market, but that’s what it is…), and then my friend Kevin comes along with this blog… that I didn’t even know about…
By Andrew Careaga on Sep 13, 2004
I like it, and have linked it at e-vangelism.com . Good work!