Ministry Marketing CoachMinistry Branding and Marketing that Works

The other day I went in to a Starbucks and got such bad service I was really mad–until I realized it wasn’t a Starbucks I was in after all. I had inadvertently stumbled into a church. So that explains the unprofessional service and the half-baked interior decoration schemes! It cracks me up what some churches think marketing has to offer the ministry! What passes as innovation often is really fluff and passing fads. Trust me, we will look back on much of what is going on in embarrassment much the way we think of some of the Jesus Freaks communes of the 70’s. Groovy man! 

So, before you turn your church into a glorified coffee shop (literally), find out what marketing really can and can’t do for ministry. Marketing has so much more to offer communication and ministry planning than a few promotional gimmicks and ideas for programming. Properly done, marketing is the process you can use to develop a fully customized missional ministry in your context. You may never have to dig out any pyrotechnics or put a single ounce of hair gel in your hair. And, good news to some, you can actually tuck in your shirt and wear a tie in some cases. :) 

My view has been that ministry leaders don’t need to take modern marketing and baptize it with the Bible and Christian concepts. We need to recognize what the Bible teaches about communication and apply it. Where marketing informs our ministry, we can use marketing ideas. Where marketing strays from the Word of God, we leave it aside.

Secular marketers have more to learn from the Bible than the other way around. In fact, in a way, modern marketing owes much of its existence to the Bible. You can learn a lot of great communication principles from Jesus and the Apostle Paul by reading how they interacted with the people they communicated with.

It was a book by Bruce Barton who wrote “The Man Nobody Knows” in 1925 reflecting on the communication approach used by Jesus, that became a foundation for early advertising thought.

In marketing coaching, what you are looking to cultivate in the people you coach is to help them not merely understand marketing tactics-you are looking to develop a new awareness of marketing that I call the “ministry marketing mindset”. I hope to show you how this mindset it not only compatible with the Bible, but comes from the Bible itself.

Ministry marketing is not a baptized version of secular product marketing. It is a separate genre of marketing all its own, much like social marketing, or political marketing are separate genres of marketing. They may have aspects in common, but in the end each form of marketing has its own rules and emphasis.

Let’s build our ideas about ministry marketing starting where all ideas about Christian ministry come from–the Bible.

The Apostle Paul

Open your Bible to Acts 17: 16-34

^“16While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ¹⁷So he reasoned in the synagogue with the Jews and the God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to dispute with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. ¹⁹Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we want to know what they mean.” ²¹(All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.)
    ²²Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “Men of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: TO AN UNKNOWN GOD. Now what you worship as something unknown I am going to proclaim to you.
    ²⁴“The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by hands. ²⁵And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything, because he himself gives all men life and breath and everything else. ²⁶From one man he made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. ²⁷God did this so that men would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from each one of us. ²⁸‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’
    ²⁹“Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by man’s design and skill. ³⁰In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead.”
    ³²When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” ³³At that, Paul left the Council. ³⁴A few men became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.” (NIV)

This is one of my favorite passages in the Bible. As a missionary, I can’t tell you how many times I have read this passage and marveled at the dynamic way Paul connected with the people in Athens. The insight he had to approach the people of that ancient city and proclaim the gospel in the public square. I have always wondered how that same scenario would play out in the modern Athenian context.

I have not seen many places where I could use Paul’s approach exactly as it is seen in the Bible. But as I study the passage, I discover some principles used by Paul, that I later saw reflected in other approaches. There seems to be a way Paul (and others in the Bible) thought when he approached the Athenians. I call this approach Paul’s missionary communication mindset.

You see two things about Paul from this passage that we will discuss below.

1. Paul Relied on God when he communicated with people.
2. Paul had a certain approach, or way of thinking when he approached an audience with the message.

First, let’s look at what it means to rely on God when communicating the message. I hear people all the time in ministry communications saying, “We don’t rely on marketing, we rely on God” or “It won’t help for us to develop good marketing, what we really need is to depend on God”

I completely agree with them. The real key to good ministry communication is reliance on the leadership of the Holy Spirit. In far too many cases, we have become dependant on programs and methods to reach people. We need to have the dependence on the Lord that Paul had when he approached his ministry communication.

But what does it mean to rely on God when it comes to proclaiming the message? Should we do any planning at all? Should we make an effort to cultivate the attention of people? Should we avoid putting human effort into the preparation of the presentation of the message?

In the Bible the work of reaching people with the gospel is compared to farming.  Paul refers to the harvest analogy when he said “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but God made it grow” (1 Cor. 3:6 NIV). Jesus referred to the same imagery when he said, “The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few.” (Matt 9:37 NIV).

In Christian gospel communication, the Bible compares our work to being like farming. Think about what a farmer does when he farms. No farmer can say, “I make corn” or “I make wheat” or whatever else he grows. At the most the farmer can only say, “I am a partner with God in an amazing process, which produces a harvest.” The fact is the farmer can not produce a crop unless he relies on God.

At the same time, the farmer’s reliance on God does not mean his part of the harvest process is completely passive. There are many things the farmer has to do, to do his part of the process. He has to till the soil, plant the seeds, cultivate the crop while it is growing and in the end he has to harvest the crop. There is plenty for the farmer to do. All this is true, but the farmer still has to rely on God if he is going to see a harvest.

In the same way, in Christian communication, the reliance on God is not a passive do-nothing approach. There are plenty of things God expects us to do if we are going to partner with Him in the harvest of souls.

One point I hope to drive home in the process of doing this blog, is to show that marketing has some applications in the parts of ministry where humans are called by God to be active. Secondly, that ministry marketing is not a baptized version of product marketing, instead ministry marketing is it’s own genre of marketing with very specific traits.

We’ll look at more tomorrow…