Ministry Marketing CoachMinistry Branding and Marketing that Works

Every Sunday pastors preach sermons in their churches that attempt to help the members of their church apply the meaning of the Bible to their lives. They speak the context of the Bible into the context of our lives. When done well, the message connects the people who live today to the ancient words from the past and translates it into applications they can live out the rest of the week. Preaching like that transforms lives–that’s good preaching!

Exegesis is the art and science of taking the text of scripture interpreting in light of the context of the Bible. The background of the times when the passage was written, the cultural, social, technological, theological implications, etc of each passage are studied and translated through hermeneutics into applications in sermons.

When ministers communicate the message of the Bible, they also need to take into account the cultural, social, technological, and theological context of the people they want to reach today.

Exegete Your Community

The problems in communication for ministry leaders come when they do all the work to exegete the context and message of the scriptures; yet do not exegete the context of the community to which they wish to reach with the message. Each message needs to be spoken into the context of the people who will hear the message, this is known as contextualization. Missiologist David Hesselgrave describes contextualization

”In a word, then the missionary task is to attempt to understand the message intended by the Holy Spirit and human authors of the Biblical text and then explain/communicate that message in a way that is meaningful and persuasive to respondents in the context of their culture” ( Communicating Christ Cross-Culturally, Second Edition by David J. Hesselgrave , 109)

For example, if a missionary to France wanted to reach French people, you would expect him to learn to speak French. You would not expect them to see good ministry results until after the missionary has learned to communicate in French. The first task of the missionary would be to learn French, so he could contextualize the message in the French language. Some time ago the first missionaries to France had to translate the Bible into French. But the work of contextualization is not done merely by learning the language.

Every missionary who is effective in a cross-cultural setting needs to learn how to contextualize the message in the society in which he serves. To do so, he studies the social networks of the people group; he learns their culture; he adapts to the technology of the people; he understands their theological background.

After all that preparation, the missionary has the best chance of communicating in a way that assures the message intended to be sent, is the message received. Sound complicated? It can be complicated. Tragically, too many ministry leaders have not learned the basics about the people they want to reach and don’t engage enough in the process of contextualizing their ministry.

Many ministry leaders are experts in the first century world and yet are almost completely uninformed about the this century world.

In the present day, many ministries wonder why they are not effective at reaching people. Yet these ministry leaders often are experts at exegesis. They have the basic skills they need to understand the first century. To be a minister and interpret the New Testament, you need to understand the first century world. But to be a ministry leader and communicate the message to people today, you need to be an expert in the “this century world”.

The reason ministry communication is breaking down in many quarters and is tougher these days is because the gospel message is not being properly contextualized to the times in which we live. Programs and approaches that used to work, no longer yield the harvest results they once did.

Note to Ministry Gurus: The Object of Contexualization is not to write books to assign blame to who is failing.

One of my pet peeves is ministry researchers and authors who have no problem writing books laying blame on the church and telling ministers what they are doing wrong–yet have never taken the initiative to do any outreach themselves. Ask yourself, if they know what will reach people for Christ, why don’t they just do it?

Anyone can play the blame game, why not rather implement something?

Often, on the other end of the spectrum are people saying we have to become more old fashioned to reach people.“We need to pray harder and get back to the older ways of doing things!” many say is the solution. Often people point the finger at the carnality of today’s’ Christian as the reason. The sermons at evangelism conferences bemoan the status of the church. Yet these same ministry leaders are the ones who are the most alarmed at any attempt to contextualize the gospel to the culture of today.

You can’t change things just by doing what isn’t working only harder or more sincerely,

Of course we should pray and we should consider that in some ways we have not relied on God as we should. But we also need to ask ourselves, have we contextualized the message? If we do not do the basic missiological work needed to communicate in our present context, we will be like the missionary to France who can’t speak French. Or, at least, like the missionary to France who speaks French yet really knows very little about French people.

Then there are the people who are in love with production. They think that contextualization means making something slicker or more impressive artistically. These design-oriented folks can be as blind to their tactics being mismatched to their community as any traditional minister. It’s not the technical production that makes something relevant to people, it is the understanding of the message.

When you point fingers telling people they stink at church marketing, be aware you may have three fingers pointing back at yourself!

Your ministry communication, no matter how slick you make the production values, won’t reach people if you can not build a bridge of understanding between you and the people you want to reach. Revisit your ministry communication, are you relying on methods that do not take into consideration the communication needs of the people you want to reach?

Christian Institutions: Wake Up to Contextualization, the Church is Changing

Beyond church ministry, at the denominational level here in the United States, contextualization is breaking down. While ethnic church planting is rapidly growing, denominational leaders are not making the effort required to understand ethnic pastors. Seminaries are uniformed about the needs of these Christian communities. Staff representation of ethnic leaders is not proportional in para-church organizations.

To some it seems enough to translate whatever is being produced into another language. Ask any missionary if just translating English materials into another language will work overseas. They will tell you you have only begun doing your homework by learning the language.

A Few Tips:

• Know what makes your community tick
• Don’t push church programs, build bridges with individuals
• Grow beyond just language translation or tweaking the presentation style
• Avoid borrowing programming ideas from another ministry context and trying to make them fit into your community
• Don’t let there be anyone in your community that knows the people in your community better than you
• To be a “fisher of men” master your understanding of people

Stay tuned….