Ministry Marketing CoachMinistry Branding and Marketing that Works

In the continuing spirit of contrariness during prime Christian conference season, I humbly offer my opinions about why you should sometimes pay more attention to what is average than what is outstanding. How do you know I am being humble? Well, I told you so didn’t I?

Everyone seems to want to know what the latest and greatest trends in ministry are. But sometimes this desire leads people to the trap of missing some of the most obvious things that can help them reach their community with the gospel.

If more people had a handle on the basic things that make ministry work–and did them– they would be as successful as they need to be in ministry.  What we really need to do is to put the huge successes we see in other ministries into context in comparison to normal ministry situations so we don’t go overboard! Passionate ministers don’t tend to do this very well.

Just Do It!

Many ministers frustrate themselves (and their congregations) trying out new tactics, when their real problem isn’t that they don’t have the right strategy –they just lack of practice of the fundamentals.

Even the largest faith-based organizations sometimes try to reorganize around some new idea to bring about more effective ministry, when the truth is if they would only actually live up to the plans they made before the reorganization, they would already be better reaching their stated ministry objectives.

But studying the trendy is a whole lot more fun and distracting! And staying up-to-date with the newest thing is highly rewarded in ministry circles. If you only study the trendy newsworthy things you can miss a lot of good things that can help you in your ministry.

“Man Bites Dog, film at eleven!” What is news is most often what is unusual.  Just because something is new, interesting, and unusual, doesn’t mean it is something you need to imitate it in your ministry. You wouldn’t want to base your take on reality by what you see at a circus side show would you?

Outliers are…well…out there!

We know in statistics, thanks to Wiki (You didn’t think I would actually study statistics did you?), an “outlier” is “an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Statistics derived from data sets that include outliers may be misleading.”

For example, last week I was in an airport and I saw one of the tallest people I have ever seen. The guy had to be nearly eight feet tall.  On the plane, even sitting in a bulkhead seat he was cramped. I watched him as we deplaned; he had to slouch down just to be able to reach down to the handle of the roller board bag he was pulling through the airport.

Looking at his height from the perspective of tallness, you’d have to say that if being tall was success, the man had more than his share of it. If you compared him to other less “successful” people, let’s say those short people who are only 6’ 7”—he’s really got the edge on those munchkin losers!

But we all know that’s ridiculous, being nearly eight feet tall is the unusual thing. The incredibly tall guy you see at the airport says less about the average height of everyday people because he is an exception to the norm.

We tend to take extremely tall people out of the equation when we tell our 4’ 7” ten year-olds, “My you are getting tall!” Conversely, it would be cruel to tell our children, why can’t you be taller just like Yao Ming? (It would be stupid to fly them to tallness conferences, wouldn’t it?) Everyone knows you don’t measure your child’s growth progress by comparing them to NBA players.

We instinctively know that it wouldn’t make sense to use an outlier in extreme in one situation, but can’t seem to make the connection to do the same in other situations that apply to ministry. Just as you can understand a lot more about how tall people generally are when you understand more about the height of the average person, you can learn more about ministry from average ministries than you may suspect. And it’s a subtle cruelty we do ourselves when we compare ourselves to the most outstanding ministries out there.

Where are the Ministry Disclaimers?

Brokers who want you to invest through their company know that if they show you the outliers in their portfolio, you are more likely to invest with them. So they show you people experiencing gains who are “outliers” with amazing returns on their investments.  The result is you are led to believe that you will get high returns for your investment, when the reality is you are more likely to experience only average returns.

They cover themselves legally with the disclaimer, “Past performance does not guarantee or imply future success.” I think we need those kinds of disclaimers from the gurus of ministry! Sometimes the gurus can be misleading, if they don’t admit their past performance does not guarantee or imply your future ministry success–run!

Research can give you a lot of information. But be careful that you take a researcher’s reporting realistically and with a degree of caution.  For example, the researchers who give outreach research information about the unchurched are very rarely the people who actually do evangelism among them.  How do you know that ministry futurist even knows how to operate his own computer—let alone contextualize technology in ministry?

Also, before you take the advice of a ministry guru and take a new direction in your church, ask a few other ministers and people who have taken his advice to give you some insights. If you can, do a little investigative reporting and talk to people and ministers in the area where the guru served/serves to corroborate the reputation they project in their books and seminars with the one they actually have. If you did a little study, you might find there’s a little smoke being blown.  Sure they have a few books—but do they have the chops really?

How to avoid being misled by outliers

• What you need to do to make your ministry better is often the most obvious thing. Try looking at the “nose on your face” more!
• Get to know other ministers/ministries in your area they may not be famous, but they can actually help you, and you them!
• Get back to the fundamentals of ministry; you know spiritual and relationship stuff!
• Study successful ministries within context and with caution!
• Don’t extrapolate information gained from outliers too far in your situation!
• Get to know what is the average and understand what is common therein lies a lot of overlooked insight!
• Be yourself, there’s no need to imitate others– enjoy the journey!