I used to love the game Pitfall back in the good old Atari 2600 days. Of course, my family had the Sears version of the Atari 2600, which meant that some of the cartridges worked, others pretended to work but usually ended up just turning the TV screen odd and unusual colors.
Thankfully, Pitfall was one that worked. I played that game almost as much as I played Defender (I'm proud to tell you that I reached 900,000 on Defender once. I played it for six hours straight and I swear I still have the groove in the palm of my hand from that old black joystick with the one red button). Unfortunately, as opposed to my obvious genius at playing Defender, I was never really good at Pitfall. But heck if I didn't try.
One of the areas in Pitfall where Pitfall Harry usually died for me was the part where you had to jump on and over three crocodiles in a pond. You couldn't just jump over them quickly all at once, you had to jump on each one of their heads, wait for their mouths to open and close, and then jump to the next one. I was always a little confused as to where my little Pitfall Harry should stand on the crocodile. If he went too far one way, he went into the drink. If he was too far the other way, into the crocodile's mouth he would go. It was a constant tension, trying to find that right spot.
This brings me to the subject at hand, as you see in the title above - church marketing. On one hand, marketing is important in the church - developing a logo, an identity, a website, some t-shirts, etc. You can make a pretty good case that every church needs some kind of marketing; otherwise, who in the community even knows that the church is around? At my former church, we needed to have signs with our logo, service times and location; otherwise no one would know where we were meeting and when. This area of marketing would be what I call the "Pitfall Pond". If you don't have some of these marketing concepts within your church, you will get lost in the pond of church anonymity. (Of course you could make the point that the best marketing tool for the church in getting your name out should be your people; very true but usually highly unlikely. Most "church people" don't know any unchurched people outside of their work relationships, especially if they've been involved in church for more than a few years.)
On the other hand, I believe marketing is dangerous. I believe we can get so focused on marketing, that it ruins God's design for what He wants the church to be. We can get so caught up in imitating corporate and business marketing methods that we fail to truly live out our calling as a church. This area of marketing would be what I call the "Crocodile's Mouth". If we focus all of our attention on this, we will get chewed up and spit out.
Let me give you a couple examples of the latter area of marketing. The first one I will cover in this post; the second one will follow in the next post. The first example would be the "Purpose-Driven" model. Most people would agree that Saddleback's model for church growth and health is an effective marketing and vision-directing tool for a church. I am one of those few (I think there aren't many of us) who would disagree. Perhaps if a church takes a couple of concepts they learned at the conferences that they paid big bucks for, they may be okay. The problem is that most churches just try to copy exactly what Saddleback has done in their own community, with their own people, in their own culture and geography and style. I know of churches who basically just copied Saddleback's purpose statement, the "going around the bases" process diamond, and whatever else they could pillage and steal. The great thing about just copying something at a conference is that you don't have to put any hard work or prayer into it. You don't have to seek God to see what He is calling your church to be in your community. All you have to do is churn out a purpose statement with the five 'M''s: magnification, maturity, multiplication, membership and ministry.
The problem is that vision and purpose statements most likely reflect a marketing statement of what the church wishes they were. Rather than Saddleback's mission statement, perhaps a more honest statement would be something like: "At So-and-So Community Church, we want to build the biggest building in the state, manage a multi, multi, multi-million dollar church budget, build a parking lot bigger than the one at Mall of America, and get our senior pastor to publish a book so that he can become a household name and bring in even more people."
Here's a mission statement for a church that someone has written that I would actually like to see a church have:
At So-and-So Community Church, we are a church that is trying to overcome our differences and inadequacies to somehow reach the lost in our community because we are honestly concerned about their eternal destiny but we're not really sure how to do it and we often fail to show Christ's love...but we really do love Christ and the lost.
How do we find the right spot between the crocodile's mouth and the pitfall pond? I think it's different for each church. And I think it takes a lot of prayer to know exactly what kind of marketing and how much marketing a church should strive to have (or not have).
Next time: the second example
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